I came across one of the most apposite adjectives ever used about New York as I was bouncing along the central line to Oxford Circus this morning. Vulval. NYC in one word: fertile, rich, earthy, forbidden, dense, sultry, steaming, lush, tropical, glistening.

It pairs up so well with another unusual adjective Don Delilo used - I'm reading Great Jones Street - one of his earlier, somewhat keatsian cum gritty urbanism prose rich novels - which is where  I stumbled over vulval.

And that other word is feculent. The antithesis of vulval, which is health and fertility; this is the reverse,the dreck, the sludge, the gunk, the muck of a great city.

Both words capture an intangible particularity about New York, a smell, a mood, a tension, a resonance, a frisson.

London is as vulval and as feculent as New York. After all, we are siblings, soul mates rendered apart only by geography and climate.

Climate is the operative word. New York has the grand gesture weather; those retreat from Moscow winters along with stunning, nigh on apocalyptic events a la Hurricane Sandy; London suffers neither...yet...climate change could herald all sorts of meteorological naughtiness, but what do we have, and right now, is soul sapping, harrowing cold.

I was bird watching along one of the Thames's loneliest estuaries this afternoon in the rawest, coldest wind I've experienced in years. Only now is blood pumping properly to all extremities. But worth it. Terry and I had a treasure trove of birds open up to us, waders of all sizes, scurrying along the mudflats, with acrobatic turnstones sweeping across the water like marine swallows with three magisterial kestrels hovering above the nearby reed beds. Vulval.