For this trip, I’ve had to divulge my social media handles, blood group, shoe size etc, and have therefore assumed the brace position for being ‘processed’ into the US, not least because I was once, under Joe Biden, incarcerated in a side room at JFK for having an apple in my hand luggage.
Though, I might add, it was even worse under Bill Clinton. My baby boy was placed in a detention centre on arrival at Dulles when we relocated to Washington, D.C. Oliver, aged six months, was travelling separately from us with a British nanny who’d over-stayed on a visa a decade before, and we didn’t know where he was for 24 hours.
This time, though, the Newark airport customs and border protection officers in epaulettes and sunglasses show not the slightest interest in my Scrabble posts on Instagram, nor even the occasional sarky tweet about neocon Liz Truss. ‘Enjoy your visit, Miss Johnson,’ I am ordered. Penetrating Trumpland is a breeze.
Within minutes we hand over cash for a bus and are soon admiring the Manhattan skyline, etched in winter grisaille over the frozen Hudson river, as we trundle into midtown. It is unacceptably cold.
Still, there’s an open fireplace in the sitting room of our suite (look, I have to Best Life it here). I am too mean to spend the 35 bucks plus tip to light it – called the ‘log ritual’ – and anyway, we have people to see, places to go, in the city that never sleeps. After a swift glass of champagne, we cab up to Riverside Drive. Soon I am making small talk in a cool ground-floor apartment filled with what I think we are still allowed to call ‘African tribal art’. It used to be the family home of the uber-editor Joanna Coles, one of the many zippy Brits who has taken Manhattan, but is now the desirable bachelor residence of her ex-husband, the writer Peter Godwin – and I am fast relearning the rules of New York.
The border protection officers show not the slightest interest in my sarky tweet about neocon Liz Truss
One, blow-ins are tolerated but briefly in an impatient city that moves at the speed of light. You can only importune native New Yorkers for so long.
Two, Brits have a well-deserved and terrible reputation as liggers. You have to at least offer to pay for everything.
‘I’m sure I sat next to you at the Bloomsbury dinner in Jaipur,’ I’m saying to Marlon James, who towers over me in a T-shirt. As most writers have been to the Jaipur Literary Festival at least once, I think this is a safe opening gambit, but he goes blank and I begin to panic.
Things are easier with Michael Rezendes, a muscly terrier of a man. He was the crack hack on the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team commissioned by editor Marty Baron to investigate one bad apple of the cloth. Rezendes proceeded to unearth an underground network of abusive priests. ‘Spotlight! I’ve seen that movie about you,’ I gush.
Afterwards we head to P.J. Clarke’s. Our waiter has movie-star looks. He tells us his side hustle is stuntman. He only pauses his shift of shovelling burgers and cheesecake to show us videos of him falling out of planes and bursting into flames.
It is brass monkeys for the whole week. We layer up to make precision sorties into the wind-lashed canyons for cocktails at Donohue’s, a dark dive bar, with David Coggins, the fly fisherman, philosopher and flâneur; to hang with Keith McNally, the man who invented downtown, at his Balthazar super-resto, where we warm up with steak frites and red wine, and Philip Delves Broughton, the author of What They Teach You at Harvard Business School.
Brits have a well-deserved and terrible reputation as liggers. You have to at least offer to pay for everything
On my husband Ivo’s birthday, I give him a cashmere-covered hot-water bottle and take him to the Waverly Inn. Le patron, Graydon Carter, is not mangeant there avec nous as he had earlier cried off, pleading a ‘bruising’ social schedule. Still, we are shown to his banquette underneath the Edward Sorel mural and are very happy, particularly when our waiter comes over and places two strong margaritas by our basket of fluffy scones. ‘From Graydon,’ he says. I look around to see if the boss has made it in after all, but the only person I recognise is Bret Easton Ellis at the next table.
We keep moving and do Gagosian, the Met, the Frick, Madison Avenue, Grand Central Station. One afternoon we are nipping into the Century Association for tea, and we are climbing the steps to the first floor just as the author and relentless Trump chronicler Michael Wolff is descending in a dashing primrose yellow cardigan with those imposing leather buttons.
‘Hi,’ we go, as if we meet every day on West 43rd Street, and then: ‘See you tomorrow!’ As indeed we do. We lunch at Flemings, before the Wolffs hop on to the Long Island jitney to return to their delectable Amagansett house that is an even bigger star on Instagram than Michael.
As the bill for four arrives after coffee, Ivo’s arm spasms feebly wallet-wards. Wolff swipes it with the ease of long practice in how to deal with an Englishman (and his wife) in New York.
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