We start at dawn. Still dark, though the clocks tell us it’s high time to be up and about, starting our business, having our coffee. Breaking our ritual nightly fast.

At the bus stop, in a thin drizzle, we wait. The morning lightens but does not brighten; all the world’s covered in grey mist.

On the train we pass through a patch of snow. Beside us the Thames is thickening. A heavy brown mass; no longer the sleepy stream it always seems at Oxford. Then we diverge from the path of the river, sipping our coffee at 60 miles per hour, still half-asleep, reading our books without paying them proper attention (my mind, for instance, has already wandered to what I will write about this moment, on the train, sipping coffee). We observe the backs of business parks; strange architecture, engineering for a world built around cars and a certain kind of lifestyle, religious in its regularity. Even running away has become a bureaucratic nightmare; form-filling, proof of identity, proof of residence, pounds paid dutifully for administrative costs that no one will ever actually incur.

Then we rejoin the Thames, wide and wild now. Half-following the river into the city.

I say I like the grey austerity of London Paddington. I say I like the way the light comes in; I like the curved industrial metal. He says, Really? Disbelieving as we pass a Burger King and a W. H. Smith. But I’m looking up, past these things which are a marker of our confused time, to what once was. I see steam, trapped pigeons spreading their stained wings, the light catching dust above our heads.

(On the way back, I think: There’s nothing quite like a good long train journey to clarify, liquefy the thoughts, so they come flooding in like snowmelt in a mountain stream. I threaten to hop on a train to Penzance. But what would I do when I got to Penzance? I wonder aloud. What would you do? He says, again mildly disbelieving. Find a pub, I decide, which is as good an answer as any, and in this grim mid-winter weather, probably the most truthful I could give.)

I have my photograph taken by a cheery chemist who asks what it’s for and then, when I tell him it’s for a visa application, asks where we’re going. When I tell him Kenya, his smile widens, but he doesn’t say anything, not at first. He shows me my photo on the smudged screen of a digital camera. I look wary, my cheeks flushed by cold, my eyes bright, my mouth crooked where he told me I could smile, if I wanted, they won’t mind, it’s not like getting a British passport. My hair, which I tried to tie back in a messy, self-contained bun, has come loose, and a long strand hangs past my left ear. I’m not displeased with the photo, though. Something in it, maybe the nonchalance, appeals to me. I tell him it’s fine, and as he’s printing it from a machine mounted on the wall, he tells us he was born in Mombasa, and then asks where we’re going in Kenya. There are good flowers there, he tells us when we name the place. Beautiful flowers–you’ll see. I pay him in cash and he tells us to enjoy our trip, and goes to help a woman pushing a pram, rummaging through the cough medicines.

At the embassy, which is like all embassies–serious, hushed, full of patriotic images and metal detectors–only in miniature. We sit and fill out our forms in a narrow room. The whole affair is much more casual than I had anticipated. I’m comforted by this. It’s not like standing in my own embassy, surrounded by armed guards, being asked to relinquish my mobile phone, my iPod, my freedom for hours on end.

We hand our passports over. And there I am: a stranger in a strange land, without any proof of identity, without any means of leaving. For a moment I feel panicked; then I feel free, and lighter than I have in years. Separated from my history, my birthplace, my future plans, my work permit. Forced into the present; and he, too, beside me, parted from his paper identity. For once we are are of equal, or same, nationality; that is to say, none. Into the wet droves we emerge, dodging puddles. We head back towards the station, the train, the river, the other city with her fair spires.

Our train out had been crowded, steamy, but now, at midday, it’s as if nobody has the impetus to travel anymore, so we are as if alone in this carriage. A stray human or two, also caught on this slow passage from London to Oxford via every imaginable village in between, flips the pages of a newspaper. Someone has left a window open and the cold air comes rushing in around us each time we gather speed, but we do not protest, nor do we make any motion to close the window, for the motion of the train has already lulled us into that magical half-sleeping state of transit. The irony is that we’re now too complacent to cross the narrow car and close the window, while all that keeps us from slipping away into a heavy doze is that fresh air.

So we’re suspended by our own actions, our own inactions, our understanding of inertia.

❧

Every time I come here I see a different city.

The first time I visited New York I was twelve. It was nothing to me but the place of my mother’s birth; and therefore, though my only impressions of it were vague and fluid, like a film, I had some invisible tie to it. I had heard place names. Brooklyn place names, mostly, because that was where she had lived; in a cramped apartment on Flatbush Avenue. I knew names. But I had no capacity to envisage anything.

So it was like being shaken in a bottle and then tipped out onto a map full of foreign words. We took a red-eye from LAX, stopped over in Las Vegas. I remember the glitter of lights, a garish city that looks beautiful only when viewed from above, in the haze of half-sleep. We stayed with friends of friends somewhere in Brooklyn, but I was still young enough not to pay enough attention to things. We took subways and cabs. Towards the evening we rode all the way out to Coney Island. That was another place-name I had known. Coney Island. I hadn’t known how to picture it, but maybe, in a vague sort of way, I had compared it in my head to Balboa Island, because they were both called “island”, because I had fond memories of playing arcade games at Balboa, winning prizes.

Coney Island was dying, dead. A warm, empty wind blew through the streets (this was April, and still cold, but slowly thawing out). The light was yellowish, brownish. We stood watching ferris wheels and roller-coasters decay before our very eyes; then we had a hot dog at Nathan’s and took the train back and I fell asleep listening to my mom describe the wicker subway seats of her childhood.

Later that weekend we visited the Met; I decided it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe, to live in an apartment overlooking 5th avenue, and then you could pop in and out of the museum whenever you wanted, visit each room and lavish each painting, each sculpture, with the attention it deserved. Easy. I liked the thought of luxury, then. We went and used the bathrooms in Saks Fifth Avenue; I was bowled over by the price tags on things. I remember particularly a lime-green silk woman’s suit, priced at about $700. I could wear lime-green silk suits and visit the Met; yes.

We went to the Village, to Bleecker street where I spent some time in a Tibetan shop buying prayer flags, embroidered pillowcases that smelled of incense, blue paper lanterns, and then to a shop full of wooden and knitted things; I bought a hat. At another shop, our friend tried on vintage fur coats, slipping them over her pale Burberry.

But that trip was mostly the Brooklyn Museum trip. We went on what I remember as a dewy day; bits of sunlight, droplets of water on the leaves in the botanic gardens, through which we strolled slowly and deliberately, savouring each springtime smell, feeling the hot, moist air of the greenhouses, until we arrived at the museum, and went upstairs where we looked at an exhibit of Hiroshige drawings. I remember the simplicity, the clean lines and colours. I was entranced. From the gift shop I bought a little necklace, a pink flower on a red beaded rope. I made notes in an embroidered notebook from Chinatown (I probably still have it somewhere, those notes are preserved).

I went back other times after that. I visited college campuses in a snowstorm (my enduring memory of that trip is drinking a hot chai latté from a funny little bar near NYU called the White Rabbit). I went for a spectacular run through Central Park. I sipped Sierra Nevada in a grotty Midtown hotel room with a few college friends. I spent a week on the Upper West Side, taking the subway, reading Don Delilo.

Each trip was made of impressions, of highlights between exhausted nights. Each trip was to a different New York; and I’m still trying to find the general New York, the essence of it, the thing that connects those highlights and impressions.

In the meantime, we’ve had a breathless, beautiful time here.

❧

There were ukulele players aplenty. I’ve never seen so many ukulele players. There were good musicians and bad musicians. There was bowling and beer. Kids danced, hipsters slouched (and there were a lot of hipsters, because this was Williamsburg, the hive of hipster-dom, the skinny-jean capital of the world). There were women on stage in tutus and leather pants and men with beards and one blonde dude wearing sunglasses playing the sitar. There were guitar cases and songbooks everywhere. It was strange to be a writer, an anything-else, in a sea of musicians. A non-musician in a musician’s world. There were blow-up saxophones (somewhere out there is a video of Ben and Xander and me swaying like big band brass players to our neon pink plastic saxes). There was confetti, flash photography. A good voice carried all the way across the room. Families in bowling shoes forgot their purpose, spilled onto the dance floor, swayed their hips. There’s that Lewis Carroll quote? “We’re all mad here.” We were all mad, there.

❧

Late lunch followed by a walk in the park. Not just any park. An elevated park. We’re up amongst the buildings–not above them, not looking up at them from the street, but weaving through them, like we’re hovering, like it’s magic. The sun sets behind us as we walk (through? over?) the meatpacking district. We can see into art galleries and meeting spaces, meet the eyes of billboard models. A strange yellow light descends upon the city, then melts away, into the night. We stand watching the long straight lines of the streets, the headlights, the glitter of windows. When we come down, our feet feel heavy. We’ve been floating.

❧

It’s like a splitting of the self. First you’re there, and now you’re here, only not all of you is here, not yet. The body can cross the Atlantic in seven hours but the brain takes longer. And before it catches up to you, you’re adrift.

Tuesday evening. We’ve been here less than 24 hours. We’ve spent the day wandering through empty industrial alleyways in Brooklyn, standing by the water staring out at the cityscape, taking photos of the graffiti on walls and the abandoned domestic items–sinks, stuffed animals–in abandoned lots. We decide to have a beer, and they’re playing the Spurs vs. Man Utd game on the television and it’s almost like we haven’t left home. Then we come out into the cold street and a woman on a pay phone is yelling, what TV, there is no fucking TV.

Then we head to Shabby Road studios so Ben can pick up a guitar. We sit on the sofa; a fat cat sits on her hind legs, places her paws together in prayer for a little nibble. There are guitars on the wall, magazines and cables on the floor. Four pianos, a drumset, a collection of derelict TV sets, a shiny red accordion. The room is lit only by candles; we stay too long, forget ourselves, and when we emerge it is dark and I am feeling dizzy.

We take a cab across Brooklyn. I am light-headed and ask Xander to talk to me in case I fade away completely. It’s open mic night at the bar and we listen to some bad poetry and then a girl in black leggings gets up on the stage and places an enormous feathery hat upon her head and sings “O Mio Babbino Caro” as if she was in an opera house, spreading her hands, opening her mouth to let loose her voice. Then, hat still on, she stands at the microphone and belts out a pop song, gyrating her hips like an MTV superstar. My mind is somewhere else–half asleep, perhaps. I’m still waiting for it to find me. In the meantime, we have another drink.

❧