If I Could Open My Arms...

...and span the length of the isle of Manhattan
I'd bring it to where you are
making a lake of the East River and Hudson

Death Cab For Cutie - Marching Bands of Manhattan



New York has to be one of my favourite places in the world. It has an intoxicating vibrancy combined with that certain knowing that New Yorkers seem to have. It's a mash up of contradictions and styles: from the steel of glass of mid-town and the financial districts to the avenues of gnarled trees that line Central Park, the stony opulence of the upper East and West Sides to the cosmopolitan bustle of the Village where thrift and chic walk hand in hand, while down the road garishly clad queens saunter past the Bowery bums or where the homless rest in Starbucks whilst chino clad students casually kick back in conversation. And it's big. It's a wonder more tourists aren't hospitalised from walking into roads whilst staring gormlessly upwards. Or perhaps that's more a testament to New York drivers' ability to stop on a dime.

Unhampered through not being there for work, although occasionally rendered useless by jet lag, rough plans were made and much wandering was done in the fresh bright cold (with occasional crippling blasts of Arctic wind). Of course so much of New York is burnt into the global psyche through the movies and you occasionally wonder whether this isn't just some giant Hollywood lot. So for me watching the subways rattle past in their aluminium-box way or walking across Brooklyn Bridge with its criss-crossed wires was like stepping into a brain dump of various cinema and tv screens.

The weekend was a host of pleasures and new experiences:

• getting lost in Central Park looking for the Dakota building,
• laughing at the ridiculous jackets some New Yorkers see fit to pimp their over-groomed primped up mop heads in,
• seeing a blue jay hop between the branches of one of the Park's beautiful twisted and tangled trees,
• eating Sushi down on the Lower East side,
• shopping for jeans and iPods,
• imagining Death's comforting laughter in Washington Park (that's one for the Neil Gaiman fans amongst you),
• gawping at the Bladerunner-esque vision of the city at night from the observation deck of the Empire State Building at night and getting terrible vertigo by looking up not down,
• the best Margaritas I've ever had in a bar where half the clientele looked as if they aught to have been famous,
• looking at giant perspex sperm at the Whitney museum after having run away from the enormous queues for the Annie Liebowitz exhibition at the Brookly Museum,

each one falling into place one after the other in the way that things do when you're just happy to go with the flow and do nothing more than enjoy yourself for no other reason than that to do anything else would be criminally stupid. And when you're just happy.

If there were any frustrations they were that I only had the weekend and all to soon had to face a man snapping on a pair of surgical gloves at JFK security. For a moment there... Thankfully, for it was still a longish flight on to Texas, he was just running a sample test on my bag.

When I look back on this trip I'll remember it for warmth and laughter, for all the reasons above and for many more that I care not to list here. And as long as no-one breaks the web there'll also be the pics I took over on Flickr

Next time: friendly Texans and the worst pants in the world.


Tunes: AC/DC: You Shook Me All Night Long