New york

New York   This is my last week in the Bagel and I’m going to give it the old college try. Two weeks without booze, ciggies or ladies have made Taki a very dull boy. The next seven days — or rather nights — will decide. The Bagel, of course, is not what it used to be, but then what is? I was recently looking at some grand Gotham landmarks, contemplating that they — and I — will not be around for ever. I walked inside the San Remo on the West Side and I was transported to a different era: high ceilings, thick walls, big windows and lots of character. Only the wildest romantic would build towers inspired by the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, topped by Corinthian temples 30 storeys up in the air. (They conceal twin water tanks.

How big is Brexodus — the flight of business and people from the City of London in parallel with our exit from the EU? I observed recently that squealing from the Square Mile has been minimal compared to sectors that make and move physical goods — suggesting that banks, insurers and investment houses have quietly completed all the necessary rejigging of domiciles and compliance that will permit them to carry on making money willy-nilly. There’s been plenty of paddling beneath the City surface. A report by the New Financial thinktank ‘identified 275 firms in the UK that have moved or are moving some of their business, staff, assets or legal entities from the UK to the EU’.

New York   This place feels funny, a bit like Beirut, where Christians, Jews, Muslims, Druze and encamped Palestinians live together but separately, with one or two million Syrian refugees completing the mix. Over here the once-ruling Wasps are now irrelevant, having moved to their country clubs in the suburbs. The Chinese are creeping up, having bought more real estate in Manhattan alone than Islamic State has lost in Syria and Iraq. (I now get nuisance telephone calls in Chinese.) On the bottom of the ladder are the Hispanics and the African-Americans, the former doing all the heavy lifting in the construction business, the latter, sadly, being the majority in city jails. The Koreans are more or less hunky-dory, working 25 hours per day and then some.

New York   Goodbye, snow-capped peaks; hello, swampy brown East River. So long, fresh alpine air; greetings to choking diesel fumes. Adios, cows and cuckoo clocks; welcome, filthy island packed to the gills with angry, mean, squat Trump haters who live in decrepit buildings they share with rats. Yes, I’m back in the city that never sleeps, and whose residents are perennially offended. That is the bad news. The good news is that the word Brexit means nothing over here — nada, as our Hispanic cousins say. Instead of the B-word we have the S-word, as in the college admissions scheme that turned into a scandal.

New York At times I used to think the place was real. The New York of films, that is. The reality is an urban agglomeration of millions, most of whom have a disinclination to speak English. Then there’s the celluloid city of 42nd Street, Annie Hall, Dead End, Rear Window and King Kong. This is the dream city I keep writing about, the one that stabs you in the gut because it’s gone. And it gets worse when you accept that it never existed in the first place. Like the woman of your dreams who has lost her looks and your best friend tells you they were never there. And yet they must have been, because I lived them.

New York   If I wrote this in one of those newspaper diaries about metropolitan life, no one would believe it. But I trust that The Spectator’s readership has faith in me, so here goes. Last week six inches of snow were suddenly dumped on the Bagel in the space of two hours, bringing the city to a total halt. Trains stopped running, planes stopped flying, cars stopped driving. The traffic cops — very short in stature and Spanish-speaking to a man and woman, and appointed to the job in order to keep them off the welfare rolls — gave up and allowed drivers to go through red lights, which turned an already bad traffic situation into complete gridlock.

New York I now know it by heart. Brooklyn Heights, that is. It takes 35 minutes by cab from where I live on the Upper East Side, and approximately $30. I even walked to the Heights once. One hour down the FDR, turn left on to Brooklyn Bridge, dodge the aggressive bikers and avoid the vendors; it’s a 20-minute crossing, give or take ten minutes depending on the crowds. Once you’re over, turn right and you’re there. The Heights are sedate, leafy streets with fine old homes turned into apartments, lush gardens and lofty harbour views. It feels like a staid patrician neighbourhood where time has stood still since the turn of the 20th century.

New York   In the dark she still looks good. The mystery and magnetism linger until dawn, then you slowly see the lines and the harshness. As with a lady of the night who has smoked 10,000 cigarettes, the coming of the light is the enemy. New York ain’t what she used to be, that’s for sure. She’s a tired old place: upper-class vertical living has gone to seed and the fun honky-tonk side of the city has been gentrified and made boring. As mayor, Michael Bloomberg did his best to ruin the glamour of New York, allowing glass behemoths to bury the Chrysler building, one of the world’s monuments to architectural brilliance.

New York   There is fear and loathing in this city, with men looking over their shoulders for the thought police and hard-eyed women roaming the television studios with lists of sexual predators. There is also dread over the latest exports from the city’s youth detention centres, thanks to Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy and ex-wife of Governor Cuomo, who is now busy bailing out criminals who cannot afford bail through the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation, of which she is president. This is one hell of a city. While the criminals are being released, the innocent (presumed) are losing their jobs, having been accused of sexual harassment. The 500lb gorilla in the room, of course, is the R-word.

Gstaad   The bells are ringing, the bells are ringing, ding dong, ding dong. The cows are down from up high, where they’ve been grazing since spring. I look at them from my window and they stare back. I love hearing cowbells day and night. Their sound accompanies me as I hit the makiwara. I like it best when the cows cosy up and examine me up close. They have a complete absence of expression: no emotion, no curiosity, serene. The one that grazes just outside my window I call Emily, and she has even more tsuki no kokoro — ‘mind like the moon’ in karate parlance — than the rest. Which is the opposite of, say, Emily Maitlis, the BBC sexpot.