To every thing there is a season. And now it's time for the end of year report. How did the present year shape up in the end? No complaints. None. Not a scintilla. 2012 has been just dandy.

Have a great start to 2013 everyone...

Archimedes

Marcel Proust observed that "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes" So true.

Bar Vetro - a standout from the crowd button hole sized cafe cum deli opposite my apt on east 58th street. Glorious coffee and the divinest corn muffin ever.

Whoever does not love New York does not love life.

A superb Moral Maze this evening: abortion, which as Michael Buerk said in his introduction is the debate that buckles under the heat of ferocious argument from opponents and proponents. For anyone interested, I'm firmly in the latter camp. To roll it back is an assault on a woman's right to be, on her autonomy.

This is my equivalent to "On first looking into Chapman's Homer.."; that dizzying moment for Keats when he became aware of the, for him, hitherto hidden glories of classical Greek poetry.

That line now stands and probably has for decades as a synonym for epiphany. That door opening instance; there's no longer any before, it's only after now.

Well, it happened to me this afternoon at the London Wetland Bird centre. An epiphany with birds? They can happen anywhere. Sudden realisations of otherness, or a striking new awareness for wont of another term, are n't aesthetically reserved. Mine was this afternoon. The merest glimpse, almost a sliver of a glance of one of Britain's rarest birds - the mysterious, fugitive, Bittern. So are it's become a stalwart unfortunately of the Red List of threatened species. Blink and it could be gone

And I did, and so did it. Gone with not even a puff of smoke to say where it had been. Not a trace apart from a few trembling reeds.

Moments like this can only really happen in London. In fact they're meant to happen here. Ordained to.

Where else could you find the biggest Bavarian winter fair outside Germany, where all but a handful of the stall holders are German speakers, and where a lively, exuberant male duo can be belting out the punchiest version of The Wild Rover outside of Dublin in German in front of a boisterous, tipsy horde of German tourists, clutching steins, arms waving and dancing like the legendary uncle at the wedding. Yep, London. Where else.

The other image I can't let go is of a veiled woman in the midst of it all, carefree and smiling, dancing. This is what life is about, should be about: living, laughing, and loving. What else is there...

Only in London can the stars align like this.

'Life is too short too sleep through..." RIP Dennis O'Driscoll, whose verse I only discovered by chance this evening aimlessly wandering through Facebook.

I said to a friend in an e-mail some days ago that:'... can that feeling be beaten of opening a new door on to something unusual and revelatory... ?'  Exactly my mood now after reading my first O'Driscoll poem - 'Someone'.

Eight in the evening and I'm waiting on a very cold Calendonian road to meet a dear friend who I've not seen in a little short of thirty years. We met again only a few years ago through, what else, Facebook.

Did I worry? Of course. Should I have? Yes. Was it a grand reunion ? Absolutely. Two and half hours, or there abouts, and the years rolled back. Unforgettable.

"Maybe it really is true that some books are universal precisely because they are so provincial and spacious precisely because they are so minimalist..."

Amoz Oz in his introduction to My Michael.

"There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a comedy, a drama, and a tragedy". Mark Twain.

Amen to that.

As someone who feels himself to be an honorary New Yorker on two accounts: more visits to the Big Apple than I can remember for one, and a citizen of London, New York's bawling, brawling, excitable, chaotic Siamese twin, as the other, I am relieved that it bore Sandy the once in a life time superstorm with it's typical equanimity, courage and fortitude. Fewer cities have more charm, more brio, more grace under pressure than New York.

I have as many emotional and spiritual memories sunk into the very marrow of Manhattan as I do in the paving stones and streets of West London. Tear any one of those, you tear a strip from me.

Serendipitous London. It throws up random encounters that just don't seem possible elsewhere as it does those incidents that, for a moment at least, make it appear that there really has been a tear in the time space continuum and you're somewhere altogether different.

I went with a friend to see To Rome with Love, Woody Allen's latest film earlier this evening; afterwards we schlepped over to the cafe of the Tristan Bates actors centre for a drink and post film rumination. For a while we were the only people there, then the door popped open and in strolled a rather frail, but oddly hearty Sir Peter Hall plus entourage.

He sat next to us and incredibly we chatted. As they say only in London

On seeing the opening and the closing Olympic ceremonies, I realise that I live in the world's maddest, most mashed up city. Would n't want it any other way.

The Olympic glow is close to making me feel preposterously conceited about living in London. Why go anywhere else when the world comes here? I should stop thinking that- it's true now, and in many ways it is normally - but if I don't put the brake on it, I'm going to never leave zone two. I even found myself  for a moment two thinking Paris was really a detached suburb of the Smoke.

The Olympic opening ceremony will become one of the few truly "where were you..." moments in British life for years to come. This echo is n't going to fade.

The way to view that whole spectacle, that voyage that Danny Boyle took us on, is that everyone saw how to make the omelet britannique: every known cliche, and those still waiting patiently to be discovered, of our mad, bad, bonkers, eccentric archipelago thrown into a pan, tossed around at a very high heat, splashed with schmaltz, garnished with kitsch, served in a jus of wild self confidence to an incredulous world. I was up most of the night trying to digest it all. 

It was insane event. Everyone has a story, a view, an opinion. I held my head in my hands for the first few minutes. Mortification in extremis. It was saccarhine, the Arcadian dream of the past, sheepdogs, bonny maidens, greensward. It could have been produced by John Major.

Yet I stayed, watching it unfold, agog with horror to begin with, then thawing, encouraged by the way it advertised and celebrated that other Britain: dissident, subversive, liberal, tolerant, passionate, all embracing, multi-cultural (now that's a phrase that needs plucking out of the dustbin the righting commentators keep putting it in). 

This is the Britain I want the world to see: our pride in the NHS, the Clash, The Sex Pistols, that we have the chops to ask the director of Liberty and that noble woman, Doreen Lawrence to help carry the Olympic flag, that we can comfortably create breath taking moments like these, and still have enough in the tank to have the Queen meet and greet James Bond. 

I turned the TV off in the early hours of Saturday, a pride citizen of Planet London. 

Bitter sweet sceptic no more. I'm humbled by it all. The world on my doorstep. 

This is the most poignant description I've ever come across of how wracking the denial of motherhood. It's from Toni Morrison's latest novel, Home. I read it for the first time in the Berkeley Square pret a manger earlier this evening and paused, then re- read again and again. This is what writing, fine, sensitive writing is all about; the chance to see life in all it's quixotic glory and lonely tragedy. "I can't have children...I did n't feel anything at first when Miss Ethel told me, but now I think about it all the time. It's like there's a baby girl down here waiting to be born. She's somewhere close by in the air, in this house, and she picked me to be born to. And now she has to find some other mother" I don't know if it's trite, or indeed if that is the word to use here, but I can't stop thinking of women I know in their forties and early fifties, who live with a similar ghost.

I've noticed there's a streak of cowardice in me over the years, perhaps cowardice is too extreme a description, but certainly, I have a strong disinclination to get involved in stressful situations with unknown consequences. Yesterday was another example. Twenty or so minutes after leaving St Pancras, the silence of the carriage was ripped apart by a howl of pain. A male's roar of grief. All of us popped up like jack in a boxes and somewhere at the top of the carriage was some broken man, sobbing, and I think possibly being attended to.

It sent that uncomfortable queasy thrill across my body. The feeling I always experience during those awful moments of stress, of over-revving adrenalin. Sweaty tension.

The audible echo of that great gulp of pain ebbed away, but lived a while longer for me. It did for others, I saw a few people shift seats or even leave th carriage all together.

Then, there was another racking howl, some twenty minutes later. A single shout that seemed to break the universe. A deep grief of unknown origin. Followed by a man's long, low sobs. Again, I thought I heard another voice, softer,solicitous, trying to comfort this shattered human.

What broke it and could I have shifted out of my seat the way the young girl did several rows ahead of me to look for one of the crew. I just sat there.

I'm back to the point in my blogging life that I always hate; I'm empty of ideas. All I can celebrate is that today marks ninety days since I last ate a bar of chocolate. A minor miracle.

I wonder whether Joe Strummer or Mick Jones ever imagined that pairing London with Calling would end with that simple juxtaposition ending up with a life of it's own; a self supporting existence that's traversed rebellion, Armageddon prophecies, blade-runner dystopia, edgy pop song, to where it's now actively touted as part of the London 2012 Olympic sound scape and life as a probable regular feature in any London music mash-up that's broadcast to the world. And in the latter, it's living it's sentiment to the fullest. 

In just over thirty years it's become part of London's universal consciousness; the younger, more attitude laden sibling to Dr Johnson's eternal truth that to "...be bored with London is to be bored with life". Why go to the trouble of hiring marketers to concoct a brand or an image, when each of these carries within them the kernel of what London is all about.

London calls. It's a loud, mouthy, pushy city, wrapped within a turban of near constant noise and confusion, of sirens, traffic, helicopters, music, trains, people, random shouts, accelerating motorbikes, roadworks. I walked along Wood Lane through to Hammersmith this afternoon with a friend. We could n't hear each other. Too much ambient noise. But it's the noise of a great city. An intoxication. It's about energy.

Bored. With London? How? I've lived in West London for twenty five years. This afternoon I discovered Wormwood Scrubs, an area of common land deep in the heart of the city and maybe ten minutes north of where my flat is. It was like finding Xanadu. Woods and meadows within sight of the Westway. Tell me how do I get bored with London if it's forever holding unknown pleasures in it's hands.

Earlier this year, I went to see the Royal Academy's blockbuster Hockney exhibition, where every gallery was hung with his depictions of East Yorkshire, a forgotten, ignored region, but not deliberately, this is not Chernobyl. The ignorance is different; it's a driven through, passed by area, neither A nor B, it's the bit in between. Glanced as a blur, without the courtesy of being looked at.

Hockney turned that on it's head, and as the alchemist a good artist really is, transformed this underprivileged, overlooked region, and drew out poetry, magic, passion, colour. Cinderella has finally gone to the ball. That ugly duckling? It was a swan all along. We just did n't see it until Hockney drenched it with nectar. It shook it's feathers and our eyes opened.

That's more or less the same transmutation that Rocco Papaleo, the director of Basilicata coast to coast, managed to do for his home territory, Basilicata; another area just as unheeded, as forgotten as Hockney's East Yorkshire. If ever there were two orphans, then here they are, rendered invisible in the public consciousness, by the shouts and clamors of more excitable neighbours.

Papaleo's film, which warmed my heart to it's very last cockle when I saw it last night, as it did for the friend I was with, draws out the the unexpected beauty of this spectacular area like fine gold wire. I was riveted. Nearly every frame is a burst of intense colour, stark contours and rolling, deep horizons.

And the plot, well, there's more than a hint of East Yorkshire poking through,with all the character's shared secrets, unacknowledged fears, heartfelt dreams as they trundle for 10 days across Basilicata en route to a music festival, evoked for me the sometime bitter sweet, yet always genial camaraderie of Last of the Summer Wine. The circle squared in a sense.

From a mini debate I've been having on Facebook with a US friend; the subject, the paucity of reason in politics

It's not just the Right's dishonesty and extremism that makes them so difficult to debate with, they've handicapped themselves through the lack of any unified internal logic. There's nothing to argue against. I don't know what Socrates would have made of this. There's no possibility of anything even remotely dialectic; the give and take of persuasive debate towards an eventual and agreed truth lacks soil. There's nothing there.

If anything could be claimed as their vision, then it must be simple knee jerkism, outright objection without the intellectual courtesy of consideration. That, and mudslinging.

And it's not unique to the US I see it, I hear it, and I despair of it here. We are not immune.

As a liberal, and if there's a term that needs to be rescued from the lexicon of abuse, then this has to be candidate material, I equally despair that the Left is too ideologically purist. Christ, do we love the cut and feel of the hair-shirt. Too hard on ourselves, too theoretical, too down.

We're a progressive tribe that ought to be articulating the blessings of actually having a unified inner logic. One moreover that has palpable fruit sweet enough for anyone's taste. Yet we don't. Partly, through that grinding intellectual masochism that dogs our every move; partly due to, and how I wish fervently this was n't the case, an insane, rabble-rousing, flame grilled, vilely opportunistic, soundbite driven media. More in love with lucre than nuance and happier with emotionalism than with explanation.

Alarmist demagoguery is driving the debate, whilst reason lies in the stable, hobbled.

Yes,it is a difficult one. Far more questions than answers; the dream, though, let's keep it alive.

I don't know which is the most damnable: this I-pad I stroke every evening in a manner not that far removed from some global super villain stroking a cat, or the atlas. Either sends me into a near catatonic state, where I do nothing more agitated than dream. My blogging days gathering dust like some abandoned house. Except I damned the leak when I was trekking through the Western Balkans earlier this month. Throughout the day I was putting something down. I re-read those pages and the warm sun streams through the curtains, there's a thimbleful of perfect coffee to sip at, and an endless parade of retired, suited old men strolling through Tirana or Pristina. All of it sunk into the every line of my very busy notebook.

Staring into the tea leaves or the coffee grounds, what can I divine from Thursday's local election results? Can I indeed see anything, after all a week is a long time in politics, so what I sense may happen, may well not. But my tribal loyalty, my political allegiance, really hopes they do. The Tories were shafted, or more to the point, they were, to recycle something Neil Kinnock once said, "kebabed". Royally. Skewered.

 More than ever now the only words that can possibly any mention of the Tories is hapless or hopeless, or just both. Osbornes's poorly conceived budget started the ball rolling from which the tremors have n't settled even now, and it's over four or so weeks since he dropped his great clanger, and got engulfed by the backwash. How cack-handed could he even be if he had tried.

And Cameron, the tennis playing, horse riding, Murdochista, how joined up is his thinking? Ideologically driven to shrink the state and drive the privatisation stake through it, he offered up the nostrum of the Big Society, in other words, put it it all back to charity. That self help groups would spontaneously bloom and take over arms of the alleged failing state and turn public sector swine into charitable pearls. Except it never ran like that; the cottage industry self help pioneers are overwhelmed, out of the depth, spinning like dervishes in a world that the public sector knew expertly and could navigate through competently, providing the services we all need, whilst the well off philanthropists who Cameron hoped would take up the slack and pump money into their own pet projects, now don't want to, since Osborne desperate to appear on the side of the Hoi poloi (a species he has more than obvious deep disdain for), stopped the charitable tax advantages so keenly exploited by the uber wealthy, who now no longer want to play in the game. So why did he do that? Well, he had to do something after handing the wealthy a 5% tax cut, funded by a raid on the benefits of pensioners by the way.

 Imagine a country where the government is in cahoots with an extraordinarily media Baron, where they tell him days before they tell an elected parliament on where they stand (favourably) in relation to a commercial agreement which is to the overwhelming advantage of said Baron; where the purses of the poor and retired are picked to fund a generous tax break for the wealthy; and then the government slaps a tax on a common food item (the humble pasty). Could be that archetypal ruritanian tin pot state we occasionally read about in the small news items in the international section of the papers. But it's not. It's Britain.

How did Cameron think people were going to vote. Radar turned on? Runes read? Too indifferent, too out of touch, too arrogant to wonder? Who knows, who cares. They got thrashed on Thursday and I'm delighted, particularly as Cameron's deadly rival scraped through to become London's mayor. I've not a scintilla of enthusiasm and certainly no time for the blond do nothing Buffon. Nevertheless, imagine the night sweats Cameron's going to be having now. To the idealogues of the Tory right, Johnson is a winner, twice now (this conveniently ignores the support the blond Buffon got from an over obliging media. Take a bow, the London evening standard...)' whereas Cams, his erstwhile Bullingdon club buddie so obviously ain't. Somewhere deep in the heart of the Tory boondocks there'll be whisperings and plottings, cabals and conspiracies. They'll want him out and blondie in. It'll be like Shakespeare's Julius caesar set amongst the agas and private clubs of Mayfair; Cameron forever trembling, et tu, Boris?

As if the Tao of Birding needed to be proved; when the watcher is ready, then the birds will come. And they did this evening, the first Swallow spotted over London and a wonderful five minute spell watching a Great Spotted Woodpecker work along a tree, pounding and drilling.

Only one bar of chocolate in fifteen days; a huge shift from the time when it would have been fifteen bars in one day. Yet, I am honest enough and realistic to know that I'll never be able to wriggle free of my chocolate chains. It's the ying that pulls me by the yang.

I know years ago I posted something about unneighbourly noise and how it was slowly sending one of my friends towards the edge of despair, which in private and the ravaged confines of her flat, she may have teetered over anyway.

I had the same experience on Friday, we all did in fact, that is all of the people who live in the same small block as me. For five, possibly five hours, (I leave for the office around 7.30, so I don't know when it stopped) the whole block lay awake tormented by a dog whimpering in an unattended, and to all of we sleep denied victims, grossly unneighbourly flat.

Genetically, I am long suffering, I put up with things: through inertia at times; through the mantra I've built over time where I simply myself situations inevitably change, and at the same time throw the balm on troubled waters by telling myself repeatedly, tomorrow is definitely another day and that anything can happen. I'm also a coward and long suffering here is really not rocking the boat and upsetting someone. Why I let the latter persist, I can't say, just I know that I do, and it's insidious.

Still, on Friday, even I had had my gutfull, and reported it to the managing agent, who to my surprise, pre-empted me, and told me she knew exactly why I was calling. Seems another resident had fired off a distressed e-mail. Whether anyone else did I don't know. All I hope is they did. I hope too for action.

The after shock of unneighbourliness never quite goes; it ripples on. We wait tremblingly to see whether tonight, indeed any night, will be violated, or if it's the joy of a straight seven hours uninterrupted.

The key for me is to leave though. Another story in itself

A neat terraced house in a reasonably affluent London suburb, washing the pots, listening to the tail end of Radio 4's Woman's Hour. Why should n't I feel I've slipped in between the pages of a Hampstead set novel?

Hallelujah, I'm a blog post. The first in weeks. When I consider how my writing life has changed, possibly irrevocably, since I walked out of the Shepherd's Bush Apple store with an i-Pad. An angel and a demon sat on each shoulder now.

There is something narcotic about this irresistible tablet device: once I wrote feverishly and regularly; now, it's no more than languor and somnolence. In writing terms, I'm lolling on the sofa, peeling grapes, more satiated ottoman sultan than frustrated creator drilling into the rock bed of whatever block or impasse I was facing.

It's difficult to pick out which of these two cities (my absolute favourites, so expect implicit and explicit bias in anything I say) - London or New York - is the cities city. A hairs breath either way, and even if I could decide, then I still could n't anoint one over the other.

Nevertheless, there are some aspects that the other simply does n't have; for instance London's ceaseless churning street fashions and those fading hieroglyphic adverts that seem to be stencilled on to the sides of most of downtown Manhattan.

I am normally punctilious about my diet: five a day, fruit, veg, white meat and red only on very special occasions; today I have eaten nothing but junk. Pie and chips in Richmond, then very low grade industrial white rice and salmon teriyaki in the Hammersmith Wasabi. I can feel my veins furring up already.

The fact of having walked from Chiswick along the Thames to Twickenham and back, the inherent health of that has been obliterated.

Even for London, this was unusual; a light skinned black male comfortably jogging on the Thames river path close to Richmond, but with a thick swastika tattoo on his chest. What is that story all about?

I know it's entirely possible to make a Magellan like tour of a single tree, mapping each root, finger tracing every leaf vein, gazing from it's base to it's crown, and experiencing the multitudinous life forms that call it home, but I need more...I want more in fact. This is why I could n't see myself returning to my own roots, that city in the North where I come from, does n't have an inch on the variety of incidents London generates without thinking it about. It's like a geyser, endless activity. Ceaseless. There's always something.

Yesterday was the Holi festival in Twickenham; throbbing, pulsing, hypnotic, frantic drumming, crowds going mad, and, being Holi, almost everyone stained with paint. Clouds of it, a polychromatic, paint palette mist. Smeared on faces, rubbed in hair, smudged into clothes. The purest bacchanalia I've seen.

Holi is the Hindu festival of Spring, and the weather met it's side of the agreement perfectly. Warm enough to sense the latent fizzle and crackle of new life about to pop up.

Today, bird watching in the other side of London: Purfleet and Rainham Marsh. How less frantic can you get, but still noisy in it's own way with seemingly endless Eurostar trains thumping past and for a short time the unbelievable sight of a Spitfire wheeling and turning overhead.

It was a kaleidoscope of birds from the strawberry capped goldfinches flittering through the trees, the stately, usually solitary white egrets (which always make me think of being somewhere in the Okavango plain, rather than suburban London), a vibrantly painted greenfinch, and the piece de resistance, the glimpse, because that's all they ever offer, of a water rail scurrying through the dense reed beds. It took time and patience to spot this shy little wader. Imagine a little duck blowing a bugle because that's the only we could do was track it's march through the reeds until it came to a small opening in the vegetation and necessity made it break cover long enough for us to see it.

Two wonderful days.

This is what I've been trying to say about the sawtooth contours of London's sawtooth skyline and have struggled over, but here perfectly caught and pulled together by Amy Waldman in "The Submission" even if it is about my second favourite city, New York....

" A skyline was a collaboration, if an inadvertent one, between generations, seeming no less no natural than a mountain range that had shuddered up from the earth".

We are all closer to each other than we might possibly imagine. Without any active seeking, I'm closer to Pink Floyd than someone who's not that much of a fan would expect.

An ex-neighbour was their publicist; a good friend dated an actress whose father was, let's put it like this, the band's senior roadie; someone else, who I know loosely, serendipitously bumped into Alan Styles, the band's legendary roadie, when they were standing on a rickety gangplank in Sausalito harbour, hoping to find something filmable to encapsulate it's gentle bohemian, hippy feel, and Alan was that man.

I love it when people find their spot in life. It's clear he did. It gives me hope.

One of the cameos they 've not shown on BBC2's The Tube is the person taken ill on the train. As we were waiting to leave Oxford Street on an eastbound Central line train last night, the driver asked if there was anyone who was a doctor, a nurse, or who had some form of medical training if they could leave the train to help someone who he said was "...not in a good way..." or words close to that.

Whether anyone did I'll never know, the doors closed and we left, and as we did, picking up speed, I saw numerous passengers looking in towards one part of the platform at a small group of others including a station assistant huddled around someone Lying on the floor with another, and possibly this was that someone who had responded to the driver's request, seeming to be asking questions.

For some quite inexplicable reason this scene has frozen into my memory.

My chemical romance with the i-Pad shows no sign of ending, or even abating. Every night I'm glued to it. Where it goes, I go.

No action lives without a reaction, and so it is here; I've scarcely blogged anything for months., the excitement this device generates is still too overpowering.

I'm even starting to forget about it. Six years of writing in possible jeopardy and this when there is London laid out in front of me every day. The world's most kaleidoscopic city. Every corner a carnival of noise, smell, colour. Exemplified this evening as I headed along the Edgware Road, bathed in applewood smoke curling up from the shisha pipe customers sat outside numerous Arab coffee shops.

One is never, or should never be, tired of London. And I'm not. What I have to do is regulate my time and return to writing. Otherwise, these experiences will melt away like last year's snow.

My writer friend says about writing that, basically, you either talk about it, or you set the clock and do it, day in, day out. His authorly rule of thumb is that this regime should after 10 years or so, transform dust into something close to workable clay.

But you have to do it. And I have n't been as disciplined as I ought for several months since being bewitched by the i-Pad. This has been my fallowest period in probably a decade.

Verba volanta, scripta manent - "spoken words fly, written words remain"

Sometimes you can turn whole pages in the Evening Standard and not find an adulatory article or photo of London's blonde do nothing mayor. Seen through a different prism this is North Korea like behaviour.

Since I moved to another office in a different part of London, I'm having to adjust to a whole new world of commotion. Mayfair, where I now work, is virtually the inverse of the City, where I used to be until last Friday.

It's residential: people walk dogs, take kids to school, they amble, they stroll; there's even a church next door to my office and a pub just beyond that. It's almost the country. No sirens, no endless construction noise, no squeaking taxis or honking buses. I feel like I've gone deaf.

The sumptuary law is looser, more casual than the City's blue / black mix and match suit ensemble. Mayfair is chic and raffish in the same breath, Chanel and ripped denim. It's affluence where the edges of these two rub shoulders. There's a lot of expensive clothes horses cantering through both of these areas.

More shops, much more than the odds and sods that fluttered around my old office, a paper shop, a bookies and a hardware store. But at least the paper shop had things I conceivably might have wanted at some point, say a pen, or a pint of milk. I don't need a Stella Mcartney dress, nor I've got anything like the wherewithal to buy a Bentley or a Porsche, but this being Mayfair and it's raison d'être, luxury, rarity and expense, these are what pass for local shops.

My greatest challenge is to rebuild the foraging routes I made during my time in the city. All those tucked away little cafes and takeaways that I've bought untold number of lunches from. I'm very particular about what I eat: more or less vegetarian during the working week with meat just at the weekends. It's what I call flexiteranism. I knew just exactly where to go in the city. Now I have to unearth Mayfair's equivalents. And so far there's been no glint of gold.

I'd never heard of Joe Paterno until a few weeks ago, and all I really know even now is he had a golden reputation as an American Football coach until it came out latterly that he'd failed to act against a fellow coach accused of child abuse. Lamentable allegations, now sadly proven I understand.

You know how it works on the Internet; you roam, meander, take the road less travelled, click link after link on a journey with no particular reason until you stub your toe on something special, which is how I came across this astounding commencement speech Paterno gave in 1973. Putting to one side the absolute seriousness of what he should have done but did n't, and this I imagine is how he'll always be thought of now, this is quite a speech: learned, peppered with apt quotes, realistic and inspirational at the same time.

No comparably renowned Brit football manager could get within a country mile of something so eloquent. To be tongue tied rates as an intellectual achievement for most Brit team managers. Look no further than the dismal example Harry Redknap's setting with his faux cockney inarticulacy during his tax trial.

Oratory unquestionably is the American art form.

It's almost a week since I returned from New York. It is the city sine qua non. To not love New York City is to not love life. It is a beautiful, forever tempting, and often bruised, exotic fruit that I can't stop myself from gorging on. I love the place, unashamedly and devoutly.

Amongst the myriad of joys, treasures and pearls that constitutes this diamond city is the profusion of astrologers, tarot readers, fortune tellers, guides. Most blocks near my apartment have at least one Gypsy Rose Lee.

Why? What's the cultural motivation? Is it the fragility of living in such a cut throat, thrusting urban dynamo? People want to feel there's something mysterious, something divine waiting or them? Hope in a crowded city?

Here I am at the Aubreve espresso bar at the ground zero of New York's hipsterdom - Cooper Square, and diagonally opposite it's cultural uber nexus - the Village Voice head office. A wastrel looking Bob Dylan waif did a "hey guy, what's happening" salutation and then created the most perfect espresso macchiato I've ever had either side of the Atlantic. Perfect.

And the highlight of it all is, well aside from the Man in Black, Johnny Cash playing over the in house entertainment, is I've got my I-Pad fired up and connected. Live from New York city....

There's a scent out there which is recognisably New York. It's the Big Apple's pheromone.

I'm not a bloodhound and I don't have the nasal super sensitivity of a master perfumer, and this all means I can't adequately say what this scent is. Nevertheless, I know it's like a modern 21st century family - it's a blend.

There's an aroma of very recently polished wooden parquet floors in there; fabric conditioner curling up and out of a thousand basement laundry rooms; a door to a pizza takeout opens and a skein of garlic drifts out, strong, pungent, alluring; it's the salty tang of the pretzel cart at 52nd and Madison; the headiness of hot coffee and cinnamon; that truly undefinable smell of an antique carpet in a quiet apartment where the only noise is muted traffic.

Put me in a sensory deprivation tank where the only sense I'm allowed is to smell, release the valve on the olfactory tank, and I'll tell you in a less time than the legendary New York moment exactly where I am.

Bottle this all and call it what exactly? Eau de Apple? Manhattan mystere? Sixth avenue shimmer?

I put my head on the pillow tonight as a forty nine year old man; I take it off the same pillow in the same town tomorrow morning but as a fifty year old man. What a great journey it's been. I have no complaints. None. No me puedo quejar

Just as yesterday, I'm awake before five listening to the surf of traffic pass along 58th street. I'm still waiting for my jet-lag to flush out of me and now I additionally have the weariness of a head cold to contend with.

Yesterday was a fiercely cold day in Manhattan; a slice and dice wind of the bitterest intensity streaming along the avenues and scissoring down the streets. Cold enough to freeze any exposed extremity to porcelain. But no snow, no rain, and the tiniest hint of a weak sun, still made it a great day.

New York has no ideal season - every season is the right season.

Getting on towards five in the morning and I'm blearily awake listening to the steady rhythm of the traffic churning along East 58th street.

I'm back in New York. Arrived yesterday and carrying a sleep debt that will have to be paid at some point; but that's for another day. Right now, I'm in the city, which other than London, has more magic, more hope, more drama, more passion for living, more elemental rawness, more sheer magnetism than any other. Like London, you commune with gods here.

As a Brit, I have more in common...much more...with this bold, throbbing heart of a place than I do with the rest of my own country: the sheer density of numbers living in the smallest possible space, almost in defiance of nature, but done so with peerless grace and harmony tells me we are special cities. Where else does that happen?

Here are two adapted civic ecosystems that have withstood every insult, felt the bruises of history, overwhelmed every exigency placed on them. That's our shared badge of honour.

Viva London, Viva New York. When Plato wrote about lovers searching for their missing half, what he really meant was these two amorata separated by the chance of geography, but forever united in shared spirit.

At some point, I'll stop hearing the siren call coming from my I-Pad, and get back to blogging in strength. That moment, though, is still like the vanishing point in a painting: visible...just, but only with massive effort. Squint and you'll see it, but that's it.

Two of my relatives have offered to hold a little get together to mark my birthday. It's a significant one. A milestone. And I'm really touched by this. Never had a birthday celebration in my life for one thing, but more than that, it's the gesture I appreciate.

It'll be a low key affair. A handful of friends, some finger food, a glass or two of wine, and interesting conversations. Low key suits me. I like to be in the back of the stalls, the spear-carrier waiting in the wings, not the lead figure. Too much attention ain't me. None of this P Diddy bling thing with thousands of alleged close friends turning up. Quality matters, babe...

Nevertheless, even the beigest of people like me for example, entertains that cheeky self-mythologising pipe dream where that's at least one fire engine, police car lights raking over houses in the dark, small hours, bemused neighbours in pyjamas peering through windows, or at open front doors, and there's someone, probably bare chested being led away in handcuffs. Now is that what we call party?

God, this is the most dismal weather to crack open a new year. Thick rain, low clouds, booming wind and insidious bone-sapping cold. We are creeping along, eyes to the floor, battened down and battered by grey.

I'm a January babe, with a Capricorn's love of the dark and sere, but even for me this is draining. A little sun, a few bright, sharp afternoons please.

London on the first day of 2012 is like being inserted into the pages of some grim Russian novel; wet, dank, preternaturally dark, and full of sombre faced individuals going nowhere. How desperate a start to the New Year.