“I’m not so in love with New York anymore” said my friend Thomas the other day, and I can’t remember who else it was I was chatting to recently who was totally down on the whole NYC deal as well. I have a suspicion that the fashionable view is that the really creative stuff’s happening in London right now… an idea which, coincidentally, rather often seems to be promoted by really creative people who, um….happen to live in London. Geddit?

Well—you can say what you like, but I flipping adore New York. I guess, in part, the three days I’ve just spent were tinged with a bit of nostalgia, revisiting old haunts as well as visiting new ones, but… I don’t know, I think it goes deeper than that. I love the colours, size, vigour, strangeness, guts of New York so much; the palimpsest, the noise, the elements of chaos. I love the fact that history is simultaneously completely ignored but is a scratch below the surface (whereas we in London revere our history in a warm deadly bath of aspic while allowing toxic chain stores and ubiquity and blandness to overtake every nook and pore of our great city).

I love the fact that I know of NO other city in the world where people have so obviously collectively decided – now, today – that this is the way that great people are going to live in a civilised way in a city. To live and let live; to participate in Jane Jacobs’ ballet of sidewalk life…”not a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself”.

And I am afraid I don’t mean Paris, where (to my mind, am I alone?) there’s a touch of meanness these days, an edginess, despair even, that I find a little unsettling.  Rome: too much swagger, not enough action. Nor death in Venice, thank you very much. Berlin: wonderful Berlin, but it knows it’s not at the centre of the world.  Perhaps New York is losing its razor sharpness; perhaps I didn’t love the new profile of downtown with the ‘Freedom’ tower rising (which made one realise just how elegant that pair of towers were, how beautifully, unfailingly, they would locate you). Who knows, perhaps I need to get to China, or Brazil? I’m not sure. For me, I can’t think of any other place in any city in the world I’d sooner live than the richly textured streets of lower Manhattan. 

There’s a whole funny joke out there, isn’t there, of certain magazines (who had better remain nameless) who once a year promote the idea that some random city in Sweden or Denmark is the most liveable place on earth; while curiously the editors, who are rather often telling us to disparage the city we live in, continue to carry on living in London themselves.   So I’m not going to fall in that particular trap. I’ve made a life in London, now, which I love, and I love our funny old chewed-up slipper of a city.

But can we have a shout for beautiful, messy, imperfect but perfect New York? I think I spent the happiest years of my life in her embrace, and nothing, nothing, nothing gives me such a shot in the arm as three days here. I’ve got to confess that arriving back this morning into the grey, frozen, wet sleet of London felt a little dull…. Please, spring, will you warm us soon?

A pair of stoops I designed in 2001, settling in nicely now:

Spring in Greenwich Village:

Hello Soho:

In the window of a Greenwich village pharmacy; old Doctor’s prescriptions:

Happiness: Brunch at Schiller’s:

Cafe Habana:

Old cast iron Soho:

Even more happiness: a liquid lunch at Odeon:

Civilised Wyeth:

The Freedom Tower rising (I miss the twin towers):

Olatz: the best bedlinen on earth (if you can cope with 5 years of poverty thereafter):

Life in New York is in the small details:

New York, I love you.

Do you remember holidays as a child, which seemed to stretch for an eternity? Time is a weird thing, I find. How is it that days and nights move so slowly or so fast, for no apparent reason? Do you, like me, have moments when you think ‘how could that have possibly only happened yesterday – it seems weeks ago?’, time moving simultaneously so quickly and so slowly. And other times, the hours and days shift as if nothing is happening all day.

So it has been in Habour Island. I’m writing at the end of a perfect week, but suddenly I realise, waking up this morning – there’s only one day left. This time tomorrow, we’ll be boarding the little water taxi at Government Dock, back to Eleuthera, Miami, and back to freezing New York City.

I remember reading recently, perhaps in the brilliant Patrick Melrose novels that my friend Alison gave me a while ago (or perhaps it was somewhere else), about the life of a young growing child, and how each year was packed with half a lifetime’s worth of experience, so brief was the life to date, and how the summers and winters seem so long as a child because they are your first or second or third summer or winter. When they are your 41st, the perspective is different: each merges one into the other. We measure our lives in decades now. In a couple of weeks, when I’m back home, I’m off with my family to celebrate my Dad’s 80th birthday, and my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary – quite an achievement at any level…and 80 years puts a lot of things into perspective.

And so it is, in reverse, I think, with holidays. When we arrived, a week seemed a long time. Each day on the beautiful, soft Caribbean beach seemed to merge with the next. Now today is our last day, and everything is seen for one last time through a sharply focussed crystal clear lens. Today is the day we notice the tiny details. Each experience is the last of the holiday, and the richer for it.

That, for me, is the pleasure of holidays. Getting away, stopping, lying still, sleeping for hours, spending days and evenings with your best friend: these things really do change your mind, and your relationship with time. For a brief moment: the world stops, and at no time is that clearer than when there was one day left.

Immigration Bahamas style.

Home for the week, at the quiet, perfectly put-together Landing hotel.

New friends and first sunset on the balcony.

Beautiful, deserted Governor’s House… which I would like to know more about…

Inside the Wesleyan Chapel…

Perfect Brisland style. We later met the fun and fantastic Jem Clarke, an English architect who’s moved full time out here and is making it his lifework to do up the old houses like this one without wrecking them. Trickier than it sounds, and he does a fantastic job.

Jem’s next project.

My romantic side has to confess, I prefer the buildings before anyone has touched them!

Colonial perfection at the Landing. You can’t really go wrong with porches and screens and white gloss paint.

Heaven has to be close to a second gin and a game of Articulate and a sunset over the Bay, on the balcony of The Landing.

Followed by grilled lobster at Queen Conch and beers and rum at Harry Os, 

and evil drunken ping pong moves from Valentina at the Vic Hum club…

…time for Church. I would say I’ve counted about 10 on the Island.

It might be true to say that the St John’s Anglican Church fete made a bit more noise than it merited (the block party went on for precisely… half a block)

Shelves at the Piggly Wiggly. I am tempted to start importing Bahamian tomatoes for sale in the shop.

The best golf carts on Brisland by far.

The elusive Valentina, who refuses ever to be photographed. She has sanctioned publication of her shadow.

And in fairness, I think the last word must go to the Ocean. Which is where, in fairness, I’m heading right now. Happy Holidays… while they last.

Well, it’s certainly a freezing start to March. I’m in London and as I’m writing, a snowstorm is threatening to blow in; and I’ve got to admit, without trying to sound smug, which is close to impossible on this blog from day to day and week to week, but never more so than right now: I’m rather glad to be leaving town for the Bahamas for a week. There, thanks, I got that one out quickly.

I popped down to Dorset yesterday after a meeting with my clients near Salisbury, where we’ve been making exciting repairs and alterations to a fine old listed building. It’s such a pleasure to see that old house breathing again, and settling into its new clothes which (even though I say so myself) look as if they’ve always been there. That one is such a happy job.

It was a beautiful drive from Salisbury, as cold clouds rolled across the plain. The Bride valley was magical in a soft grey sea-mist.  

I planted my first early potatoes, and took a few photographs of the house and garden, for those readers (or commentators, I should say) who have clearly been missing a dose of Dorset; and I just took it all in, and enjoyed  the quiet muted palette of green and grey and earth brown.  

Will you check out that compost? There is something incredible in the alchemy of time turning your old vegetables and peelings into dark nutritious soil, and I can’t exactly place why I find it quite so satisfying. But I do. More than anything.  The pile on the right is slowly cooking now.

Spring in the garden seems poised… waiting for warmer weather, holding her breath. It’s remarkable how within a matter of weeks the mornings and the evenings are light again; how the darkness of winter mornings steadily retreats without you even noticing.  As Luke in the office is inclined to comment just about now, the evenings will be drawing in soon.

Cold flurries of sleet and rain suddenly swept across the valley and I retreated indoors. But no sooner had the storm arrived, than it passed, and the landscape sparkled in brilliant warm sunshine.

Steam rose off thatched roofs, and the transformation was extraordinary.

I distinctly remember as a child being fascinated by the way water droplets were held in the leaves of lupins, and nasturtiums.  I was probably about 5 or 6 when I thought I had discovered diamonds in the garden. Intense excitement gave way to equally intense disappointment, which is maybe why I’ve never forgotten.

A crazy out of season calendula.

I had a surprise call from my friends the Hursts. Call in and see Edward’s stand at BADA next week, if you’re in London. It is bound to be amazing, although I confess I’d rather be on the beach. 

Anyway, I made Edward and Jane make the tea, while I finished planting more broad bean seeds.  After all, I’m not back for a couple of weeks and I knew that things couldn’t wait that long. 

As we walked around the garden, drinking in the beauty of afternoon, and swapping tales of this and that, an extraordinary soft light filled the valley, and the house and landscape glowed. From time to time, I wonder what on earth I’m doing, with my lease on this old house and pouring my heart into it, and into the garden. Then, at moments like this, it’s all pretty clear.

But it was a fragmentary hint of spring. The sun set, and a grey mist blew in once more. Within minutes the evening had returned to chill winter.  I had a gently alcoholic evening with my neighbour round for supper, chatting and putting the world to rights. The perfect response to a bitterly cold night.

This morning, snow flurries blew about the house and garden all day, and the temperature had plummeted. The day had given a briefest suggestion of things to come, but for now: March is here like a Lion. Is it too much to hope that by the time I’m home, it will be gone, like a Lamb?