New york

New York New York, New York, once a wonderful town/ The people are crap and the mayor’s a clown/ The only safe space is a hole in the ground… I could go on, but why be so negative? Arriving from bucolic Switzerland, Newark, one of America’s ‘murder capitals’, feels like Katanga circa 1960. If this isn’t a third-world airport, then I don’t know what is. My driver tells me I’m lucky that the virus is keeping people away otherwise it would take at least three hours just to get through customs. None of the electric signs that would tell us which terminal to collect our luggage from is working, so

Gstaad It is not exactly a stop all the clocks occasion, let alone cut off the telephone, but I’ve finally come to a decision. My looking-at-cows time is over. I am going to leave good old Helvetia and find somewhere nice in the green and ‘unpleasant land’ I read about in Charles Moore’s Notes last week. (Corinne Fowler, what a halfwit; now, according to her, the British countryside is racist.) Easier said than done. The reason I want to move is that I’ve had it. For the first time in my life I’m bored with my surroundings. Sixty-two years is a long time, but then Gstaad isn’t the charming little

‘How are you bearing up?’ ‘Is everyone terrified?’ ‘What’s the mood?’ These are the questions concerned family and friends are kindly asking about New York City which, according to my armchair epidemiology, is about ten days behind Italy and ten days ahead of Britain. It would be reckless to describe things as calm, not with a New Yorker dying every seven (?!) minutes, and refrigerated trucks parked ominously outside hospitals. But I sense no mass panic. Life, of a sort, still goes on. People run, dogs are walked, post is delivered, Amazon arrives, and the shelves are stocked with food. The absence of cars without the presence of snow is

New York   This is my last week in the Bagel and I’m going to give it the old college try. Two weeks without booze, ciggies or ladies have made Taki a very dull boy. The next seven days — or rather nights — will decide. The Bagel, of course, is not what it used to be, but then what is? I was recently looking at some grand Gotham landmarks, contemplating that they — and I — will not be around for ever. I walked inside the San Remo on the West Side and I was transported to a different era: high ceilings, thick walls, big windows and lots of

How big is Brexodus — the flight of business and people from the City of London in parallel with our exit from the EU? I observed recently that squealing from the Square Mile has been minimal compared to sectors that make and move physical goods — suggesting that banks, insurers and investment houses have quietly completed all the necessary rejigging of domiciles and compliance that will permit them to carry on making money willy-nilly. There’s been plenty of paddling beneath the City surface. A report by the New Financial thinktank ‘identified 275 firms in the UK that have moved or are moving some of their business, staff, assets or legal

New York   This place feels funny, a bit like Beirut, where Christians, Jews, Muslims, Druze and encamped Palestinians live together but separately, with one or two million Syrian refugees completing the mix. Over here the once-ruling Wasps are now irrelevant, having moved to their country clubs in the suburbs. The Chinese are creeping up, having bought more real estate in Manhattan alone than Islamic State has lost in Syria and Iraq. (I now get nuisance telephone calls in Chinese.) On the bottom of the ladder are the Hispanics and the African-Americans, the former doing all the heavy lifting in the construction business, the latter, sadly, being the majority in

New York   Goodbye, snow-capped peaks; hello, swampy brown East River. So long, fresh alpine air; greetings to choking diesel fumes. Adios, cows and cuckoo clocks; welcome, filthy island packed to the gills with angry, mean, squat Trump haters who live in decrepit buildings they share with rats. Yes, I’m back in the city that never sleeps, and whose residents are perennially offended. That is the bad news. The good news is that the word Brexit means nothing over here — nada, as our Hispanic cousins say. Instead of the B-word we have the S-word, as in the college admissions scheme that turned into a scandal. More than 50 people