New York, I love you, but I need to get home |
I reached New York for the premiere of the fourth series of Industry in a mild state of delirium. I was travelling from Lamu, and it had taken four flights and 20 hours in the air to reach the US. Lamu is so beautiful that it briefly makes you consider whether to bother with western civilisation at all. On the rickety flight to the island from mainland Kenya, I had sat next to a German count I vaguely knew. ‘You looking to get a little fucked up?’ he asked. I mumbled something about ‘family time’. He nodded and wished me luck. On New Year’s Day I ran into him again, by which point he had abandoned all pretence of dignity. It felt fitting, then, that I should follow this holiday with a work trip to New York to party with abandon. It was in service to a television show I co-created about people whose job it is to indulge in impulsive self-destruction. By the time I reached Manhattan, I was determined to prove that Europe’s fading aristocracy does not have a monopoly on fun.
I love NY but invariably leave the city thinking: ‘Get me out of here.’ Act one is always seductive: cold-as-space martinis, dinners in wood-panelled rooms and first nights that end........