"On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok..." I thank Saul Bellow for such a voluptuous and accurate simile. In that handful of words is everything about the tropical intensity, the sweat, the thudding heat of New York in summer. It's winters are bone chilling with glass cutting winds sweeping down from cold Arctic Canada. Spring is sublime, Autumn divine. A four season city as any good one should be and a mood for each of them

Like many visitors I experienced New York years before I finally got there. I knew it's physical characteristics and social geography probably better than I did places near to my own home; and as I grew up, began to intuit it's emotional possibilities: exhilarating and inspiring, but where the floor could drop from beneath even the most gilded.

Expectations point towards hope, but they never guarantee that the destination will actually be as passionately, indeed as lustily dreamed of; New York was, all boxes ticked on my personal checklist. It was what I yearned it would be and has never let me down subsequently. Forever stirring, always exciting, and impossible to be neutral about. Any city worthy of that title must confound the senses, New York is like holding a piece of cut crystal to the light, where every plane, every edge refracts differently to the next. No street is the same, no block is the same. Sans conformity.

For such a relatively young city, there is, nevertheless, something just as epic and as timeless about the Big Apple as there is with my two other favourite cities: London and Paris. Almost Homeric: a sense of struggle and a myriad of personal odysseys. History drips downs the avenues and floods cross streets. Big, grand sweeps of history, counterpoised with the intimate, personal histories of the anonymous millions who counted, and continue to,themselves as it's inhabitants. I think it's that aspect that appeals to more than any of great historical statements and events, the idea of millions upon millions of hopes sunk into the concrete and tar, and that when I'm there I'm walking where dreams have been made, or dashed, is in a strange way, a very moving experience.

I go to New York not for cut-price shopping trips; I go to be intellectualised, to pick up new ideas, other modes of thinking, to be challenged, to be presented with new things to consider. Only huge cities can do this, contain this elixir, they're the three I've mentioned earlier.

My first ever night in New York was exactly as Saul Bellow described: torrid, steaming, and above all else thrillingly magical. A sienna yellow sunset that took an eternity to fade and held for hours the perfect silhouette of mid town Manhattan. It glowed. I felt something bestowed upon me, what that is I can't begin to explain, other than a sense, an intuition, an excitement. Better to leave the groping for words alone, instead I'll let Bellow paint the word picture I can't complete: "...people...thronging the streets...among the stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which, a dazzling profusion, climb upward endlessly into heat of the sky."