There is no such thing as a queue in New York. Perhaps that's why I ignored the guy looking morosely at a tub of hummus in a First Avenue bagel shop, confident that he hadn't yet decided between the poppyseed and the onion. But he had.
"Hey," he told the server. "I was here first." I retreated, all apologies. "Please," I urged him. "Go ahead. I'm sorry." The server eyed him malevolently. "You trying to make trouble? You wanna get a bagel elsewhere? This lady is British. We're fighting Bin Laden."
"Hey," I said. "That's kind of you, but this guy needs his bagel." I tried to adopt the kind of diplomatic expression that Colin Powell might wear during negotiations with a Saudi prince. The UN headquarters were only a couple of blocks away, after all. "I'm not in a hurry," I added, biting off the words, "to invade Iraq."
The guy got his pastrami. I took my cream cheese and carton of Tropicana orange juice and headed for Central Park. Pleasingly, the park I saw in late autumn was nothing like the sweaty, baseballing park I remembered from a visit during a heatwave in May 2001. The leaves were brash, the Sheep Meadow was a baize green, and the Wollman Rink, which is taken over by roller skaters in the summer, was packed with Ivy League couples rubbing cheeks with gloved hands. The tinselly music, piped over the ice by the Trump Company, sang of Fifties America.
Just around the corner, and just as absorbing, is Central Park Zoo. Try to arrive just before the sea lions are fed. You will be jostled by scores of local schoolchildren, but you don't go to the circus for a private show. You may also be tempted to attempt a conversation with one of the penguins. Again, don't hold back: no one else does. "Come on, Mr Mungle!" a young girl urged a chinstrap teetering on the edge of a rock as his peers leapt in fearlessly. "Don't be scared! Jump!" Mr Mungle - the Woody Allen of the penguin colony - waddled away, shaking his head.
The miniature rainforest is another joy, particularly if you come across the giant tortoises putting away their salad. An ant colony has obligingly set up a nest against a sheet of glass. But avoid the polar bears: so dignified and despairing that I could almost believe they remembered the Arctic.
Not far from Central Park, on the Upper East Side, is a very small museum which will appeal to those who can't face the vast Met. The Frick Collection is a private house hung with pictures, some of them famous (Holbein's portrait of Thomas More) some obscure (a tiny 14th-century Dominican friar pursuing a giant Jesus), and a few simply perverse (a roomful of Boucher cherubs puzzling over telescopes and fountains). Children under 10, happily, are not allowed in at all, but a marble fountain decorated with turtles breaks up the solemnity of the place.
By now it was growing much colder. I dodged a steaming manhole on the way to the MetLife building, where I was meeting a friend for cocktails. (A tip: the raspberry Cosmopolitans at The Royalton, 44 W 44th St, between 5th and 6th Avenues, are very good: try to get a seat in the padded Vodka Bar inside, which encourages confidences). The heavy rain forecast for the rest of the weekend started to fall just as I was gazing into Saks Fifth Avenue, where window upon window of clockwork dolls performed the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Inside, women were flicking through racks of scarves, rabbit fur stoles and hats, and pulling on gold-embroidered evening wraps.
By the following day, New York was enveloped in a continuous drizzle. It was probably not sensible to set out for the immigration museum at Ellis Island, but I did anyway. Following the crowd getting off the Battery Park ferry, I found myself standing at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Don't do it. She looks far more impressive from Brooklyn Bridge, and visitors are no longer allowed inside the statue in case they try to blow her up. The huddled masses spooning down the wretched refuse at the restaurant next door deserve better.
Stay on the ferry instead and get off at Ellis Island. Over 12 million immigrants disembarked here - so many that over a third of Americans have at least one ancestor who passed through. Immigration is still a dirty word in Britain, but perhaps one day London or Liverpool will have a museum to rival this one.
When you tire of the illogical subway system, and the rain is so heavy it obscures the Chrysler Building, and the peculiarly insincere intonation a New Yorker uses when he says "I'm sorry" begins to grate - and you have run out of money for cocktails - there is a remedy. Buy a copy of the New Yorker, find a watery coffee, and pick a movie. Most of them won't have been released in the UK, so think of it as the equivalent of a preview ticket.
On my first visit to New York, I tackled a vast Sunday brunch at Florent in the appropriately named Meat Packing District. (Readers may like to consult the menu on its website, mentioned below, and mentally triple the size of every portion. The combination of fruit salad, French pancakes, Canadian bacon and home fries could have fed Elvis for a fortnight). But the MPD is a long walk from Midtown. So I took the subway to Brooklyn, and worked my way through Sunday's New York Times in a rather gloomy diner, reading the Vows section with appalled relish - and wondering if, just like my grandfather, I could one day leave London and make a brand new start of it, in New York.
Useful links
New York City for visitors
Restaurant Florent
Frick Collection
Ellis Island
Central Park
Wollman Skating Rink
· Ros Taylor travelled to New York with Priceline. Three nights at the Beekman Tower Suite hotel and return US Airways flights from Gatwick to New York via Pittsburgh cost a total of £540.12, including taxes and fees.
For Ros's account of booking with Priceline, click here.
