Quarantine heralds the death of Mid-Atlantic Man

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 a couple of years I came tantalisingly close. I got a job at Vanity Fair in 1995 and even though I was based in New York I would return to London about once a month. I could never afford Concorde, but I was such a regular on Virgin Atlantic that I obtained one of its coveted gold cards, which meant access to the Virgin Clubhouse at JFK. Inevitably, I got to know other wannabe Mid-Atlantic Men and we formed a little clique. We called ourselves ‘Nylons’ since that’s what it said on our airline tickets — ‘NY-LON’ — and we littered our conversation with British and American slang. We told each other that Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell were in our gang — an honour they were unaware of — and we somehow managed to sneak into their Halloween party during New York fashion week in 1996. It was fancy dress and Moss came as Snow White with a train of seven dwarfs in tow. It was all downhill from there.