First John Updike left us, and now John Hughes. Both in their own, magisterial ways, chroniclers of certain slices of Americana: Updike, his characters freighted with gloom, secrets, mysteries often to themselves, let alone others, scurrying through the quiet and shade of anonymous suburban America streets in and out of worrisome relationships; whilst, for Hughes, his province was a territory of exuberant, gently rebellious young High Schoolers cocking an affectionate snook to their elders.

Neither artists will ever fade away. In the decades to come, (I'm sure of this, by the way), people will settle on Sunday afternoons to watch a John Hughes with the reverence and anticipation the way millions have already with Ealing Comedies.

It'll be the same with Updike; his canon is too large to be spiked. I'm sure in a century's time there'll be people on tubes, in buses, in their privacy of their living rooms, cracking opne something by Updike. Too good not to.

I've eaten in New York. I've slept in New York. I've shopped in New York. Even been electrocuted by a girlfriend in New York. Not intentionally, no electric iron thrown in the bath, or a cunningly rewired light switch. None of that: all natural, straight from the source - static electricity. Something about Manhattan - that crazy energy, eh - got the two of us literally sparking. We could n't go anywhere, do anything, without an opening fireworks display. Hold hands - zap ! Pass a shopping bag over - pow ! Swap newspapers - zing ! All the time: snap, crackle, pop. I felt quite a kinship by the end of our stay with those neon blue, buzzing insectocutors you see in the prep areas of restaurants. Those things are always fizzing. Bubbling with volts. Just like us on that trip.

The highspot of our unplanned lightshow came one evening when both of our lips were momentarily singed by an arcing zip of electricity.

Is New York a static electric hotplate (though, it's not as if either of us were lovers of nylon clothing)?

My reading on static electricity leads me towards to something to do with NYC's geology as the likeliest explanation. Only time in my life I can ever say I've been a powerhouse, and very green too.

Then again, had the two of us inadvertently communed with a darker, more elemental force? Who knows what we might have seen if we had ever bothered to open the fridge in the apartment. Remember what Sigourney Weaver saw in Ghostbusters when she pulled open the fridge door...that smoking, frothing pit...

"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."

Years ago, I had a meal with a girlfriend in a restaurant in New York, called, very simply, the Broadway Diner, hidden somewhere in the cluster of streets around the high west forties and Third Avenue. Unremarkable as an eating house, but, nevertheless firmly in the tradition of the Great American Diner, busily churning out the classics of American cuisine: meatloaf, burgers, ribs, chilli, turf 'n' surf. The food that built America. I've no idea whether it's still there, or if it's morphed into the local Gap now, it's some time since I've been in New York. But if it's still there, and even if it is n't, it still carries a memory.

We finished our meal, lingered for a while, drinking coffee, idly watching the world go by, then finally called for the cheque, paid the cashier, and opened the door ready to jump back in to brassy, blaring Manhattan. We were, in fact, already one foot out into that world, when our waiter yelled across the restaurant in a voice that could have comfortably sliced through steel or stripped paint from walls, that: "... in New York, no one, but no one, ever leaves less than 15% tip ! " Some rebuke! Had we? Definitely seemed like it from his aggrieved reaction. But neither of us could actually remember, whiplashed into silence by his outburst, and thrown straight into one of those wild animal caught in the headlights moments. Each of us frozen. Stunned. But let me explain that in a little more detail in my case; it was n't his eccentric, left field approach to customer relations, I've seen worse things, seen them go physical even, harsh words, a fist, although, thank God, I've never personally experienced that particular level of...uh... service. What got me was that I lacked, completely, the wherewithal to send a zinger back. There was nothing hot and sizzling to throw off the griddle of my righteous indignation his way. Nothing.

Exit Archimedes and girlfriend like two embarrassed and forlorn sheep, abandoned by the flock. Oh to have been able to call down the soul of Oscar Wilde or Churchill, or even a stand-up comic, and be handed just one custom made retort, a catch-all for use at a time like this. Nope, not a thing. Yet another instance of that sad, unbreakable rule of life that only after the event, and usually too long after, is it that the perfectly formed barbed reply takes shape. Why the time delay? Why could n't I have spun back on my heel and archly flung back that we were two location scouts busily eyeing up possible venues for the next Bond movie, and the Broadway Diner had looked good, but really, what do you think I'm going to be telling Cubby Broccoli now...