Past perfect

It was one of those perfect New York days that make you feel grateful to be alive. I’d eaten my favourite breakfast — pancakes with maple syrup and crispy bacon — then salved my conscience with a huge bowl of fresh fruit, and was now taking a post-prandial walk in Central Park. The sky was an eggshell blue, the air was crisp, there were skaters on the ice rink, and squirrels were chasing each other across the branches of the trees like a scene from Beatrix Potter.

With that extra spurt of energy Manhattan so often provides, I decided to walk up to the reservoir, further than I’d ever gone before, and when I got there, it looked so beautiful in the late November sunlight that I walked right round it. And then I ambled happily over to the Guggenheim for its superb exhibition of Spanish painting and received one of the nastier jolts of my life.