New york

New York Don’t let anyone tell you the Bagel is worse off than Kabul, where three people were recently shot dead by Islamist gunmen for playing music at a wedding. No siree, people over here are shot every day and night but not for playing music at a wedding. Give New York credit where it’s due. The city is a bloody horror if you’re living way uptown, way downtown, or in the Bronx, with the rest of Gotham experiencing a level of street crime not seen in a decade. Robberies and felonious assaults are up 15 per cent in a year and gun arrests by a whopping 20 per cent.

It’s nice to be back in London, and Glebe Place is a delight. Mind you, it’s not the mansion I was expecting, just a very nice mews house on a very quiet part of the street away from the King’s Road. The noise of the city gets on my nerves, which means that I’ve lived on an island, and among cows, for too long. Alexandra seems to like London more than I do nowadays, and that’s a switch if ever there was one. Knightsbridge was home for 40-odd years, but the wife hated it. Writing about one’s wife is a bit like kissing your sister and all that, but ensconced

New York It’s party time in the Bagel, or at least private party time. Yours truly is an extra man nowadays as my wife and I have been separated by pandemic restrictions for six months. Alexandra is in London, quarantining after visiting two little blond things in Austria for my fourth grandchild Theodora’s first birthday. I am doing dinner parties non-stop in the Bagel, as if I were a gaywalker back in the 1970s. Actually, I’ve been seeing a lot of old friends who have thrown dinners for Lita and George Livanos. We have mostly been the same crowd, as New York society types have gone the way of wooden

New York The acerbic writer Gore Vidal was once asked which period of history he would choose to have lived in. ‘The 17th century with penicillin,’ was his answer. It was a good sound bite but I don’t agree. Just the smells back then would be enough to kill me, and what about the people without teeth? And the plague of 1665 makes today’s virus seem like a slight head cold. Personally, I’d choose post-second world war New York City, as described in Jan Morris’s wondrous Manhattan ’45. I got there three years later, to Manhattan, that is, and the place was as fabulous as I had heard and imagined

New York The Big Bagel is getting so bad that even the baddies are demanding the fuzz do something. As the body count rises, it is obvious that the victims of violence are predominantly the poor and minorities. Last week, a woman killed in a drive-by shooting had been attending a vigil for a friend who was shot dead after someone stepped on the gunman’s shoe. A man slashed on a Manhattan subway platform had recently been paroled for an attack on a Jewish woman and her mother. Brazen gunslingers are shooting the living daylights out of each other in the Bagel, and there was a shooting spree in the

New York The high life has gone with the wind because of you know what. The last time I went to a glittering ball, Marie Antoinette still had a head on her shoulders, or so it seems, and sweats and leggings are now ubiquitous at intimate dinner parties. Here in the Bagel fashion has followed the street for a long time, making high fashion seem as irrelevant and obscene as Anna Wintour being paid millions to kiss the ass of celebrities. No sweats, no leggings was my only rule for an intimate dinner for Prince Pavlos, expertly cooked by Michael Mailer and attended by Arki Busson and three youngsters of

New York Ha, ha! What London turned down, the Bagel accepted with alacrity, namely the poor little Greek boy. And it took ten minutes max after disembarking to go through customs and collect my luggage. Kennedy had fewer people than a gay wedding in Saudi, and then some. Mind you, the Upper East Side, where I live, is also as quiet as a grave, the only sound being the occasional ambulance with its siren on racing for a tea break. Central Park, now devoid of tourists, has never looked better, weeping willows with recently sprouted leaves, birds singing the length of an empty Park Avenue, long green lawns stretching out

As an ambitious journalist making my way in Fleet Street, I dreamed of becoming a Mid-Atlantic Man. Tom Wolfe came up with the term in the mid-1960s to describe someone who divided his life between London and New York. Not for social reasons, but because his career required him to spend time in both cities. Wolfe said the typical Mid-Atlantic Man worked in a field like advertising, public relations, television, commercial art, motion pictures or consulting. But journalists could join this exalted tribe too. David Frost, who was a kind of journalist, was the ultimate Mid-Atlantic Man. He practically had a permanent berth on Concorde. I failed, obviously, but for

New York Back when people used to read newspapers, they called it a ‘human interest’ story. Now it appears as just another statistic. The know-nothings on social media, who express utter drivel on a daily basis, will have pretty much ignored it, but a dreaded pro-Biden sheet actually published the full story. A young Japanese man came over to the Bagel from Tokyo to make it as a jazz pianist, and that he did. He started a trio of his own and toured with several bands until the fateful night of 27 September, when he rode the New York subway after a video shoot. Tadataka Unno is now 40, and

New York It’s nice to finally be in the Bagel, a place where the cows have two legs and no bells around their necks. I walk daily around the park two blocks from my house and stick to the Upper East Side in general. The park is by far the best part of Manhattan, and it’s better than ever because of you-know-what. Yes, the virus has chased away the tourists, and without tourists the rickshaws that had turned the park into a free-for-all have all but disappeared. Central Park is the only part of the city that Bloomberg’s three-term despotic reign didn’t change for the worse. Bloomberg was a so-so