Fatherland

So I popped to Good Times Liquor to get the weekly shop in, and this time whilst making sure I came back with booze that had booze in it, I stumbled accross this little lager:

Aside from getting horribly homesick for sloppy kebabs, trampy women and the chino’d men who fight for them, I got curious about what a US take on Southampton would be like, and what was so secret about this most secret of ales. So having discovered the town was in New York by reading in the back of the bottle (incidentally, they don’t print ABV on the beer over here so you can’t properly plan your evening around the levels appropriate for the chick who winked at you from the other side of the bar), I then found that the secret of the beer is that it tastes like special brew strained through a vagrant’s pyjamas. The next step was to get to Southampton.

After a little reading it turns out that Southampton was on Long Island and a part of a group of towns known as The Hamptons. This includes Easthampton, Westhampton and Southampton, though understandably they saw fit not to try and recreate Northampton. I’d heard of the Hamptons, I think from watching the odd episode of Sex and the City on the off chance that Charlotte might get her kit off. The times I saw that show there was plenty of promise that something was going to happen, but much like my plan for a Kylie & Beyonce hokey cokey it never happened. What put me completely off of it though was that it was based on the premise that Sarah Jessica Parker could get laid, and frequently. I believe she looks something like a foot, to demonstrate this I have the following ‘Seperated at Birth: SJP and my right foot with a face drawn on it’

What the show did establish though, was that the Hamptons were a place for rich people from New York to go in the summer and have parties with other rich people so that they could at least wake up with someone who could afford to leave in a taxi. So I headed out to Southampton via the Long Island Railroad, catching the train about 11am. Arriving at 2pm and having massively miscalculated how far it was I was greeted with absoultely no people, no cabs and no sign of (or to) a town.

Taking a chance and heading down one of many deserted nondescript roads (but still getting the feeling I was being watched) I arrived in the town centre about 15 minutes later and immediately got the impression that this Southampton was distancing itself as far as possible from Old Southampton. I will write something about the obsesion with the Stars & Stripes that the Americans have later, but this town had them absolutely everywhere.

There is apparently a great beach here so I made that my goal and kept on walking. The place is something like the Lanes in Brighton, full of shops that sell absolutely nothing that anybody wants such as galleries of local artists, a fine wine boutique and a Saks of Fifth Avenue. Rich people lived here in their large piles with lawns perfectly manicured by Jose, and security systems monitored ‘24/7′.

Nowhere to buy fags, or frozen chickens then, and strikingly no bars. After a call to Steph to check train times it was apparent that if I didn’t catch the 3:30pm back to New York I would become resident in Southampton, condemned to a life of conversations about property prices and how that Mr Bush is such a nice young man albeit over a good glass of merlot. So I wandered back in vague direction of the station, noting surprisingly that in a place that up till now had more ducks than people there were a few similarities to actual Southampton. Notably an HSBC, a crap train service and fat kids in ill-fitting clothes smoking tabs on the street.

And then I saw the sign.

So I was in there quicker than Ryan Seacrest says yes to a TV show, and surprised to find it full of geezers all at the bar perfectly well oiled at 3 in the afternoon. It was like 3pm in any pub in Kilburn, full of working men getting away from everything, though this lot were all sipping fruity drinks. There’s something odd about men with hands like shovels and steel capped boots drinking a Mohito through a straw. A couple of beers (and thankfully no advances) later I made my way to the station, where even the train reminded us that we were definitely still in America for the three hours of toilet and buffet-car free travel that is the Long Island Railroad. I can tick the Hamptons off my list, but on reflection 6 hours of travel for 90 minutes in Hampstead On Sea probably wasn’t worth it.

By the way, my foot also does a reasonable impression of Luke Perry.