Jeremy Vine

New York My son pulled back the curtains and took in the full splendour of the twilit canyons. Lights were coming on all across Manhattan. ‘Wow,’ said Daniel. It was a slow, unabashed expression of awe. I thought of those lines from The Great Gatsby where F. Scott Fitzgerald imagines the colonist approaching the New World for the first time and coming ‘face to face at last with something commensurate to his own capacity for wonder’. Like father like son. My first collision with New York occurred more than quarter of a century ago. Back then, America was just five years clear of the disaster in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter was fumbling in the White House and the Big Apple was in the grip of street crime. Much like now it was a nervous and unsettled time.

Turning 41, an anonymous age if ever there was one, I found myself back at the school I went to three centuries ago — or so it seems. The occasion was a memorial to a favourite teacher. Neil Laing taught English and died young, at 56. The chapel of Epsom College was full of people in various stages of physical collapse whom I realised, on closer inspection, were the same age as me. We never thank our teachers, and here we were, belatedly, thanking him. He would throw open the windows of his classroom and thunder his enthusiasm for literature and life; a lesson on Paradise Lost would suddenly switch into an appreciation of Erica Roe. He coached hockey and rugby but encouraged the misfits, like me, who were good at neither.