New york

At weekends in our summerhouse at Quogue on Long Island, we go out to buy the newspapers and paper-cup coffee at the busy 7-Eleven in Westhampton. Several brisk young Hispanic women serve the long line of customers. Nobody mentions Donald Trump, though his latest vomit about deporting everyone like them is often on the front pages of the papers they hand us. The hurt and angst it must inflict may be mitigated somewhat in New York by the moral clarity of the city’s Daily News editorials blasting Trump as ‘un-American’, and the music video ‘Amnesty Don’, a spoof western mocking his talk of ‘going soft on immigration’. To the rage of

In or out? Almost two months on and I’m afraid the great debate shows no sign of abating, certainly not in our divided household. And while we’ve had several referendums over the matter, the result is always a stalemate. The only upside is that this argument has nothing to do with Brussels. It’s far more rudimentary. The battle in Palmer Towers is whether we eat in or out when wanting to see friends. My wife Joanna — who, as it happens, was for In over the country’s EU membership — is a firm outer, while I, who voted Out on 23 June, am a determined inner. As with the EU

Shelter Island is nestled in the Long Island Sound, ten minutes by ferry from Sag Harbor and a good 30 from the horrible Hamptons with its Porsches, mega-mansions and celebrity trash. It is where, on my last week in the Big Bagel, I was taken back to the Forties and Fifties for a weekend. Shelter Island is what the Hamptons used to be: tranquil, beautiful, rustic, unspoiled, with lovely ponds bordered by shady oaks and maples. The pace slows the minute you get off the ferry and step into the peaceful enclave. There are forested hills, secluded coves and quiet beaches. The sea is hardly the Mediterranean, but there are

When I was 38, I let a drunk pick me up in a bar. You know, just to see if I still had it. It was raining. It was a November evening, and I was somewhere in the backwoods of the Adirondacks. I was driving from Rhode Island to Toronto, staying in motels. Taking my time. Getting lost. His name was Billy Ray and he was from the south. The land of Spanish moss and blurred boundaries and antique sentences delivered in a languid drawl. Beautifully dressed, an elegantly ruined bachelor of 48, he looked 65. He said he was related to the man who had invented Coca-Cola and had

New York It was the best of times — downtown — and the worst of times — uptown. Let’s start with the horror near the park: cranial atrophy, unrelenting grossness, overarched and overgrown eyebrows, posterior-baring bondage outfits, and de haut en bas attitudes were the order of the night. Never has a museum site been more desecrated by a freak show, and the Met — maybe the best museum in the whole wide world — should be ashamed of itself. A great institution such as the Met always needs funds, but allowing a freak show of publicity-starved clowns is not the answer. Let’s take it from the top. The Metropolitan

   New York I went downtown to Katz’s the other day and had a pastrami sandwich that made me want to shout. God, it’s good to be bad and eat bad, but not necessarily act bad. That’s the trouble nowadays. People take care of their health, eat properly, exercise obsessively, do mental gymnastics such as crossword puzzles, and then go out and act like slobs, use the F-word non-stop and talk with their mouths full. If I hear one more time that 60 is the new 40, I will punch the first octogenarian, male or female, who crosses my path. Some buffoon who recently took up tennis has written a

   New York Even after all these years, I’m still at times floored by the scale of the place. And it’s always the old reliables that stand out: the silvery arcs of the Chrysler Building, the wide avenues, the filigree of Central Park, that limestone monument to power, the Rockefeller Center. Curiously, the recent trend for tall, slender and glassy housing among money-laundering Russians and Chinese does not mix with the city’s motto of ever bigger and grander. It’s as if the transparency of the glass structure is teasing the authorities about the origins of the owners’ wealth. Come in and take a look, we have nothing to hide. Last

I have finally moved into my new flat, a jewel of a place in a pre-first world war Park Avenue building. The finishing touches won’t be made until Christmas 2016, as work is only permitted during the two summer months. That is the way it should be. The past three years have been agony for me. I’ve been living in an apartment that shook all day while Jeff Koons, a so-called artist, was putting up a behemoth in the shape of a house directly behind me. Worse, a Russian oligarch, who had hired dodgy construction workers to tear down and rebuild a monument to his thievery, had them ignore night-time