Imagine How Slow They'd Go If They Didn't Honk!

In which Dan goes to New York, and New York fails to notice.

It takes us nearly three hours to get out of JFK. Two hours in immigration and the rest in the taxi queue. In immigration you keep your cool because to lose it would be stupid. The posters advertise professionalism and courtesy but the man who deals with us, like every immigration official everywhere in the world, is surly and officious. So we keep our humour in the queue by laughing at the brazen macho posturing of CNN: 'The Situation Room' where 'News=Information' and the subtitle reads: 'Iraq Not So Bad says Senator.' It is all too like a parody not to laugh.

In the taxi queue, in the cold, where there are cabs waiting for people, and people waiting for cabs, and between them one 'taxi marshal' seemingly intent on only drip feeding the two together, it is much harder to remain in good spirits.

Good spirits hit us in the first bar. Brooklyn Lager. Proof if proof is still needed that American beer is just fine thank you. Ignore Budweiser and Coors and Rolling Rock and anything whatsoever with the word 'lite' in the name and there is not a thing wrong with American beer, it's bloody good beer. We find a small back-of-the-pub burlesque show in the East Side. American beer, pasties and a G-string. All done in very good taste. Girls and boys in equal mix in the audience. We like the Easter Bunny girl best.

Day Two is so cold even a giant breakfast can't stave it off and it cuts clean through to tooth and bone. Popular opinion puts us on a half-circle circle-line tour of the bay. The statue of liberty is disappointingly small, Brooklyn bridge is not, the space where the twin towers once were is a vacuum that pulls at your heart, the inside of the boat is warm but reeks of grease and sugar. In an even warmer bar afterwards friendly girls serve beer and there are free peanuts to shell at the table. We enthuse over the particular delights of New York bars, in their way so much better than London pubs, and at least twice the chance of rock music on the jukebox.

The evening is a nightclub in Brooklyn. The first taxi driver refuses ('aint goin sarf of the river mate'), the second needs help from the man with the map. Outside the club we join the wrong queue but the bouncer says he'll sort it out, we realise late he intends to take the cash himself and sneak us through, it works despite having all the signs of not working. A small adventure. The adrenalin wears off after a couple of drinks, the DJ is good between the bands but the bands are bad and I am too tired. When I booked the trip I was single but now I am not, and I am missing her.

Two of us go home early leaving two to dance the night away. We hit a bar near the hotel for a nightcap and get dragged into a game of pool. I text my girlfriend a long rambling text. At four in the morning we are the last to bed.

On Day Three the sun shines. We grab breakfast in Union Square where sparrows fight in the dust at our feet (in New York even the sparrows are aggressive) then take a Q train to Coney Island.

Coney is tumbledown beauty, faded grandeur, a lingering anachronism from a different age. The Ferris Wheel advertises no accidents in 85 years which only manages to worry you that it is an 85 year old Ferris Wheel. The gondolas come in swinging or not swinging. We go for swinging.

'Buckle up your seatbelts,' says the man who operates the door lever. We all reach behind but there are no seatbelts.

'Suckers!' he says.

The air is clear and from the wheel you can see all the way to the Manhattan skyline or next door to the equally ancient roller-coaster. We go there next. As a roller-coaster it is fairly tame, but it rattles, shrieks, hops, and flexes around the track like it is going to collapse into a cloud of rust and rotten wood any moment and that is exhilarating.

There is nothing left to do but walk along the beech, play shoot the freak, and drink a beer. We walk along the beech, play shoot the freak, and drink a beer sitting on the boardwalk, the 'shoot the freak' announcer amusing us as we sit. 'Waddya gonna do? Come to Coney Island and not play Shoot Da Freak? Ya godda shoot da freak. Lookadme, I godda freak that works for free. Hey you, you wanna shoot da freak. He wants to but she won't let him. Come on people. Shoot da freak in his freakin' head.'

We add some 'bad-a-bing's ourselves.

Back to the city and tourist shops and Central Park. One of us has bought a talking John Lennon doll and we look for the Dakota building in order to re-enact his shooting for the cameraphone. It is probably a good thing we do not find it.

The TV news back at the hotel says a storm is coming and builds it up like Katrina II: This Time It's New York. We go for pizza and drinks. Some of us crash out shortly after midnight – others don't.

Rain hits in the early morning. It clangs and echoes off the AC unit poking out the window of the room and I do not sleep well.

Day Four it is still raining. French toast, bacon, banana, and maple syrup for breakfast. Macy's to exercise that cheap dollar. A soaking dash three blocks to find a pub.

'Don't cut and run,' I shout, dashing behind, jeans sodden to the skin.

We spend the afternoon in a cinema.

In the evening my parents come up from New Jersey where they live these days, and between us we consume about half a cow. I end up having same conversation with mum I always have in America, the one where she says how much safer it is there and how much less crime there is. The following day a student in Virginia shoots 33 people.

The others text their estimated position, but the estimate is too loose, and it is raining too much, and I just watch TV in the hotel till I fall asleep. It does not take long.

Day five is the last day. We hit some shops for those who want to hit shops and reunite in a posh restaurant at the top end of Grand Central Station. 'Grand' is right, you could stick a row of houses in there without crowding it. We spend freely on a very long lunch and then back to a bar where the news hits.

I want to understand. I want it to mean something that I was there when it happened. But New York is not Virginia and it is not even a cultural act anyway, it is a stupid insane individual act, it is just people killing people for no good reason the way that people have always killed people for no good reason whenever they have had the means.

Having the means, I decide, is not a critical factor, but it is at least the only factor we might control.

The TV news plays sad music over the report, like when in a movie the hero's family has been killed by the bad guys. All of a sudden I want to go home. In a few hours, I do.