There's a boat that's leaving soon from New York

As we prepare to leave New York, we're thinking of all the places that we've developed an affection for:

- Indian Road Cafe, in virtually one of the last buildings on Manhattan Island (behind the white building on the point)...

- the Hudson River with its New Jersey cliffs...

- Hastings-on-Hudson, with its Norman Rockwell streets....

- and the walk over the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey, with its backward glance at lower Manhattan...

It strikes us that these are all out-of-town experiences, or at least on the fringe. If we came back to live here, we would probably want to live somewhere like this, away from the radiant heat of the endless sidewalks and walls of buildings.

But what are you going to do? We've been knocked out by the standard of theatre and the galleries, the music... This is New York: when you've seen the Gauguins,Chagalls, Braques, Picassos, and Seurats at one place, you go down the street to the next place and see theirs. Isn't  it the size of New York that generates this height of excellence? Although I do wonder about the size of Pliny's Rome or Mozart's Vienna. Is inspiration always human, social and external?

Last week, we even saw evidence of New Yorkers' desire to green their city - the High Line, the disused railway line at the third-storey level downtown that has been converted into an urban garden.


 It immediately became one of those places we've developed an affection for.