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.

Tick, tick, tick...another year drawing to a close. So to that hardy band, that small but perfectly formed group who drop by my blog, happy new year and best wishes for 2012. Let's take it by storm and give it all we've got.

After ten years of trudging past Julie's on my way to Holland Park station and the office, I finally went in this afternoon. Everything I imagined about it realised the instant I stepped in with a friend; unobtrusive, almost butler-like service in gorgeously furnished rooms.

We were on the first floor sat on reclaimed and beautifully restored church pews surrounded by taste with a capital T. Opposite us was a horse shoe shaped alcove where four young Irish mothers, each clearly fashionable in that effortless way that affluence brings, and all in some way, shape or form, involved in something creative, were holding a birthday party for one of their daughters, a shy, brunette, who beamed when a birthday cake appeared and the table serenaded her with happy birthday.

It was quite glorious in a way I can't exactly articulate.

The ambience of Julie's is intoxicating; relaxed, arty, comfortably déshabillé, and timeless. No difficulty in imagining Harold Pinter, or a Rolling Stone or two, maybe Hitchens and Amis junior, or Stella McCartney holed up somewhere in this honeycomb of amazingly dressed rooms. I could, I can, see it so easily

I know there's more than a hint of Hyacinth Bouquet, snobby aspiration in other words, streaming through what I've written. But I loved this place.

I would have written far more this month except that I'm still honeymooning with my iPad. At some point the intensity of the infatuation will dim. It has to. Don't they all. But right now, I'm still enslaved, albeit joyfully, to this exquisite delight.

Just the pleasure of stroking the screen is enough to get me purring. I can't help it. I simply can't.

Yesterday did n't go the way I'd originally planned and I had to make some abrupt changes, otherwise my wheels would have stayed spinning in the mud; nevertheless there were compensations, small rewards, really, and there was an insight.

For the sheer need of seeing people, I walked from my flat through Kensington, along to the Edgware Road, and eventually on to the West End.

The closer to the West End, the busier the streets; Holland Park was a near tomb, scarcely a person, nothing open except for the solitary lighthouse that was the Windsor Castle pub, with just a scattered handful of drinkers

Kensington High Street was marginally busier with a small grocers open, then further towards Kensington Church St, Cafe Concerto was a sardine can of tourists, clearly relieved that at least somewhere was open. Not a table free.

After there, I headed through Kensington Palace Gardens and eventually to Queensway, the de facto beginning or end, depending on which way you're approaching, of Arab London. The London that never closes essentially and from there till Marble Arch, London fair hummed with life: cafes, restaurants, arab grocers, supermarkets, pharmacies, even a brace of hair dressers, were open.

Edgware Road, which is the passagiata for London's Arab community, spun with people, they were everywhere, at outdoor tables smoking shisha pipes, shopping, laughung, walking arm in arm eating, queuing for restaurants. It was a marvellous sight, like a latter day modernised 1001 nights. I was entranced.

I mentioned a number of small compensations: a polychromatic Jay, that I saw darting across a Holland park side street, and then later on the trek home, a fox scampering out of a garden near Queensway. I love the sense that the wilderness has n't quite left London. There are still echoes if you listen hard enough.

The insight? A woman. possibly homeless, probably friendless, reading a several days old paper in a fast food restaurant. James Baldwin described his protagonist in Another Country, as one of the "flattened", where the common denominator is quiet desperation, nameless torment and silent misery, not just on one day, but every day. London, like New York, the setting of Another Country, has too many of the "flattened". This woman was one. People should n't be falling through the cracks.

For reasons that I'm loath to talk about publicly, I've been far longer at the margins of my physical, and more importantly, emotional strength than I have been for a long, long time. Too many storms, too few ports to ride them out in.

It's been the comforting, inner world of books, the balm of words really, which have steered me away from the less pleasant side of introspection and it's cousins, anxiety and worry. I'm a firm believer in the benefits of the long dark nights of the soul; they're there for a reason, we all need to review and rethink. Life's not static and we can't be either.