God, I’ve eaten some crap today. Taco Bell for breakfast and an entire Toblerone for lunch. New York is not a healthy city for me. It’s like London – I eat too much crap, drink too much and stay up too late. The only difference is that when I wake up here and go through my receipts, I don’t find I’ve spent an entire month’s rent.

Still, despite half a dozen of my friends debating the idea of permanently relocating here, I don’t think I could join them. It might not kill me, but it certainly wouldn’t make me stronger.

The question came up at dinner last night, actually. I caught up with Ben from Pretty Matches, his friend Isabelle from Corsica and his two lawyer friends whose names, shamefully, I have managed to forget. One of them asked me what my plan was after this trip – whether I’d go back to London or somewhere different.

My answer, quite honestly, was that I’m giving serious thought to remaining nomadic. During this trip I’ve learned that, as long as you don’t mind hotel rooms, it’s perfectly feasible to live virtually. Skype means I have a permanent number that follows me wherever I go, food – outside of London – can be both cheap and healthy if you know where to look, a decent (by which I mean often excellent) hotel room can be had for £30 a night plus tax, including breakfast, if you know how to play the game (my parents are both hoteliers and I grew up in the darned places) and, providing there’s an Internet connection, I can pretty much work from anywhere.

Actually, I’m wondering how far it would be possible to push it – what standard of living you could achieve with no fixed abode, and how little you could get away with earning to fund it. To give you an idea – the entire cost of my trip to date (and, yunno, it’s been a blast) has been substantially less than my monthly cost of living (including rent, bills and the like) in London. Really, substantially. And during that time I’ve partied VIP-style in Vegas, Austin and LA, driven a 71 Challenger to Laguna Beach, a Mustang across the desert, crashed a toga party with 700 hairdressers and been invited to speak at their school, travelled across America by train, nearly ordered a drink from Kate Bosworth in New York, crashed a drunken wake and – well – all of the other adventures I’ve documented on this here blog. And I’ve done a ton of work too – probably more that I’d have got done staring at my walls in East Dulwich.

So how could I push it further? Some kind of bulk deal with an international hotel company that, for the same or less than annual London rent, gives me a room in any city, any night?
That must be possible. And then subscribe to services that offer virtual ownership of stuff – pretty cars, mailbox services, DVD rental by mail or online, storage for important stuff that I don’t want to lug around… that kind of thing. It’d be like that couple who lived in a Travelodge. But about a million times more cool. And what a life.

I think I’m going to run some numbers and see how it stacks up. Perhaps just for my own amusement, but who knows? I mean – aside from favourite books and old love letters, what do you actually need to own any more?

Right! It’s 1:18am in New York and my hangover from yesterday refuses to go away. I think there’s nothing else for it but to wander to the 24 hour McDonald’s and buy something big with cheese (sorry, @Eris, I know what they feed the cows. And I promise I’ve been buying my dead animals exclusively from Whole Foods. But right now some antibiotics are the only thing that might bring me back from the brink).

I’m off to Montreal in a couple of days before heading to San Fransisco for a couple of weeks. It’ll be my first trip to San Fransisco and I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it. It’s making me a little giddy just thinking about it.

Right! Time for cow and cheese.

…

Update: Dammit. I couldn’t do it. I got to the door of McDonald’s. I had my hand on the handle, but then I heard it. The story I was told in Austin about the chickens without their beaks. Those damned beak-less chickens. So, I walked across the street and went to the 24-hour healthfood deli place and asked them to make me a fucking dolphin-friendly tuna sandwich which I’m now eating with some Lay’s barbeque ‘chips’ and a mini Babybel to give me my meat and cheese fix. Thanks, Eris. Thanks a lot.