Diary – 15 January 2005

New York

America is supposed to be the can-do society, where you can order up pizza at three o’clock in the morning and refinance your mortgage with one click of a mouse. Don’t you believe it. Our local pizza parlour only opens when it feels like it. More to the point, negotiating a mortgage requires the applicant to enter a dreamlike state in which the nightmare of Pandora’s Box, represented by one’s credit rating, is countered only by the constant repetition of the realtor’s mantra: H-ome …H-ome. And then, when you are finally approved and ready to proceed, ‘closing’ drags on for so long that by the time it arrives it’s already time to think about inheritance tax. Seven different lawyers, representing every conceivable interest, had to be assembled before our most recent deal, involving a two-bedroom apartment, went through. Just getting the seven to turn up in the same place at the same time was a triumph of organisation.