New York missive no 39 - Elias Sime's tapestries

Tucked in a corner of the African galleries at the Metropolitain Museum of Art are three stunning tapestries by the Ethiopian artist Elias Simé. Amidst the sensory overload that’s the Met they summoned me over like three green fires. They’re abstract though that’s a meaningless word, they’re of life itself and everything it's rooted in, shades of green thread climbing up the canvas to create a world. That kind of encounter with art is miraculous. Like a hidden trapdoor opening onto a garden. Or a baby finding its toes for the first time and, even better, realising they’re a part of him. What art's all about.

Maybe something else grabbed my attention too, an echo of my grandmother, whose art was tapestry. In her last days and through a morphine haze she said she could see her tapestries floating around the room.

I feel like that was just the start of an encounter. Simé's tapestries are part of an exhibition on African textiles: so the talks on the exhibition on 1 February are now in my diary. And I’ve discovered that the Santa Monica Museum of art in Los Angeles has a whole show of his work this Spring. I might just have to go.

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M and I had found ourselves in the Met after a wintery walk round the reservoir in Central Park, when I’d needed the bathroom. We decided to use the museum’s. So in a way I have the urge to pee to thank for the discovery of Simé. The wintery walk was to work off our mountainous brunch at Flagship Diner, a bustling 24-hour local institution in Queens.

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The start of 2009 is hanging in an unsteady balance between hope and fear. You can feel it here in Morningside Heights. Flags are hung out on the streets ready for inauguration day and euphoric images of the Obama family still clad the newsstands: a profile of Michelle in “Black Hair” magazine, bumper commemorative issues of Time…yet the talk on the street is recession. A sign outside the soul food diner on 109th and Broadway sums up the conflicting emotions: “Rack & Soul Recession Special – Good through Inauguration Day. Lunch – $15 for Entrée, Beverage, Dessert, Tax, and Tip…Yes We Can!”

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This morning the sound of people scraping snow and ice off the street five storeys below woke me up. I lay in bed listening, while a clean morning sun spilt through gaps in the curtains. And am now typing to the sound of Sidney Beckett’s clarinet, in my newly-homelyfied apartment. I’ve been run down with a bug and drugged up the past few days so have been staying in more (as much as I can make myself, in this temptress of a city). It made me notice certain things in the apartment that shouldn’t be here, like the very dead plant on the windowsill and an empty frosty-flakes packet from P who lived here before. So those have now gone. And I noticed certain things that should be here but weren't, like a desk, more splashes of colour, my pictures hung in the right places on the walls, wireless internet, me-clutter kicking about the place. So those have now been installed – a satisfactory nesting process, establishing a base to rest the new year on.

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The squirrels up near the Cloisters back in November were all incredibly fat. Ridiculously fat, like teddy-bears, though they still had the physical fitness to be chasing each other round tree trunks. I figured they were full of Halloween pumpkins.