Central Park –  7.30am – April 2005

Spring in Central Park is like everything else in this city. It roars through town without looking to left or right. No polite faffing around with a few snowdrops and daffs in February and March. No, it’s blossom at Mach Ten while The Great Lawn is still lay-me-down-and-take-me flat from the last of the snow melt. The first flush of dog walkers is out too, pooper-scoops and fluorescent ball-throwers in hand.

An Upper East Side matriarch enters from near the Guggenheim, around the high 80s. Age-wise she’s not much more than a decade behind. Her silky trench coat is cinched into a grip that a small child could fit its hands around. It comes just above her knees. Big mistake. These knobbles look like individual Yorkshire puddings, or popovers as they would say here, that have only risen on one side, and are strapped onto the middle of two sweet pea stakes. Maybe that’s where she came from, half a century ago, Savannah girl, bosomy and mint julip generous in spirit. Slowly decades of the duress of extreme wealth have shaved her down to a child’s size, about the same as the one who could get its hands around her weeny waist. Her face is a death’s head, polyfiller-caked with the latest that oxygen and caviar creams have to offer. The hair is candy floss, or cotton candy, teased so hard that it lost the ability to laugh, or indeed move, sometime in the 70s. The sweet pea sticks are black-stockinged with Minnie Mouse below, bobby socks and trainers with NASA meets NASDAQ rocket wedges. Her very small whippet is on a very chic lead. Shrunken women here have teeny tiny dogs. As their dress size drops towards the Sacred ‘O’ so they seek out miniaturised gazehounds, poodles, flat coats, no coats, the latter surely the emperor’s new clothes of the kennel clubs? Best in show, worst in winter.

Her nemesis is at hand. Professional dog-walker, the body-builder/guard brand, pre-Giuliani Bronx Black, the sheen of his green track suit as shiny-bright as his smile. He is Norland Manny to a clan of pooches, eight of them, and only one larger than the palm of one of his hands.

Knobbly knees and teeny dead knight’s footrest dog are at hand. Walker Norland Man is not paying attention. Eight, and now nine, leads are making early morning Central Park spring macramé.
Downtown – 6.30pm-a very-hard-to-join club – April 2005

If I can make it there, I better change my hair, eyebrows, teeth, name, game, just start again… We Brits plagiarise so hard. Take it, fake it, make it big.

Hips and hipster jeans thrust out at every angle Kandinsky ever covered off. Up and down a long and brittle chit chat bar they stretch and yawn. Only the barman and bar bitch have American accents. There is a little something in the air, eau de re-invention. In the 70s and 80s there was the acronym FILTH, failed in London try Hong Kong, now we have FILTNYC. Get a loft, a job in publishing PR, hang onto the homebred counties’ accent, and add the Manhattan pushiness, and you might get to ride all the way to Sag Harbor. And all on the strangely as yet still unexploded myth that an almost old-fashioned BBC voice (with a bit of Estuarine-on-Hudson thrown in, or vowelled out) means that the speaker is educated, connected, has a high moral code, and an even higher IQ. Pale Prunella made it all the way to Uptown Downtown on the back of an almost readable glossy mag interview with a Middle Eastern mass-murderer. Now she’s quite the queen of the tumbled slate floor warehouse conversion crowd.

Union Square – Bluewater Grill – 8.30pm – April 2005
Girlfriends having supper, Candace Bushnell girlfriends rather than the Sapphic brand, though one of them is Greek, New York Greek, so she still almost eats. Her gal pal just pretends, her expression a mixture of jealousy at her friend’s ability to put food in her mouth almost like a normal person, and profound pity that this perfectly curved and carved woman opposite her apparently lacks any kind of self-control when it comes to the croutons in a Caesar salad.

The eater is just back from a trip to England. ‘We got lost on the way back from staying with our friends in Suffolk, and we ended up in this really ugly neighborhood, rougher than…’ she pauses. ‘I can’t even think of a rough neighborhood in Manhattan anymore.’ They both laugh. The skinnier one flicks her eyes left and right, just to see who is watching, to check who is witnessing their hilarity, their joie de almost vivre.

Meanwhile the lady in the harbour bears the fairytale at her feet:

‘Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tost to me,
I will lift my lamp beside the golden door!’

Published previously in The Financial Times and on Travel Intelligence