To my British friends who call me and innocently ask, "I'm going to be in New York, can we have lunch?" this blog is affectionately dedicated. For there is another New York. And it's not Manhattan, or Long Island or even the Adirondacks. It's a backwater, far from the corridors of power, influence and affluence, altogether a different America from the one I imagined when I lived in London. Welcome to my new world of marauding turkeys, kamikaze deer, elusive bears and a sometimes insuperable language problem, Western New York - for better or worse!
Some of the material on this blog may have appeared in different form in the Catholic Times, the Buffalo News, the Wall Street Journal and so on. It includes a collection of my favourite columns, which aren't otherwise available online.