TODAY I will be in New York City. I will wake up and go to the window and watch amazed as the traffic which has been going all night along Lexington Avenue continues to snake by, and the shops open up and link their suitcases to a chain outside on the sidewalk to entice you.
This year I will have packed an extra suitcase because every other time I go to New York City I end up buying a bag on the corner of Lexington and 57th Street. So much so that they think of me as a regular, and look out for something cheap and roomy to carry the towels and books that somehow mount up on any visit.
And I will go and have breakfast in a diner, where they will have a false bonhomie or maybe it's a real bonhomie, and make wisecracks and have eggs over easy or sunny side up and waffles. And the customers all feel better because people know their name.
I will have a little stroll around Hammacher Schlemmer on east 57th Street. It's meant to be a toy shop, but its not a toy shop at all, it's a place of total fantasy. I have a beautiful umbrella that was bought there, black on the outside but when you open it up, the inside is like the roof of the Sistine Chapel, the most cheering thing a human was ever to see in a rainstorm. They have all sorts of things which look like something else - telephones shaped like ice buckets and ice buckets shaped like telephones. They have a thing that looks like a golf putter that you could carry around in your golf bag but really it's a secret flask, and when nobody's looking you slip the head off and drink a bloody mary or a brandy or whatever will help you see the ball better.
Apart from the umbrella I never actually wanted to buy anything there but it's an eye opener about the Consumer Dream gone mad and an attempt to second guess the fantasies of those for whom a present must now be a jokey thing since they have everything they could need. It's also electrifying to see all the serious, earnest people in there studying fun gadgets. Proof again, as if it were needed, that none of us knows anything about human nature.
AND then l will go to Krolls, the marvellous stationers on East 54th Street. It's like an Aladdin's cave full of things that you'd want, but this time I will remember that American pages are all punched in different places than ours. This is something I have blanked out about usually and I come home with lovely pink and purple refills which won't fit into anything.
And I will go to see if that wonderful temporary shop for large ladies is still there. Or indeed anywhere. It's a sort of fallen off a lorry kind of outfit which sets up in any premises that are between lets. They have a day glo notice saying "Big Gals", and they have white bikinis the size of ships' hammocks. It's an immensely cheering place.
I will check to see has the Topless Car Wash been reinstated. Last time it had been withdrawn as a service because of neighbourhood protests. Nobody could tell me how it worked, or whether the topless people who cleaned your windscreen got covered in suds, or what had happened to the things that look like two dead green sheep that hang unattractively in car washes in this country.
I will glance up at the windows on first floors to see whether the Nail Studios and Psychics have increased or faded away. For ages I believed that these were actually euphemisms for Something Else. That when you said you were going to get your Nails done or visiting the Psychic you were going to a red light sort of place. It seemed the only explanation for the hundreds and hundreds of such establishments around the place.
People are always interested in sex and have been since time began, so that would make sense. Surely there can't possibly be that number of customers wanting their nails built up into long shiny talons. There are, it would appear.
And a similar number of people prepared to part with good dollars to know about the future from Madam something.
I WILL get my hair done in a bad tempered place because I have to see how they will exceed themselves in rudeness on each occasion. Sometimes they tell you that it's not a hairdresser you need but a skin specialist, other times they ask how do you expect to look good with a round face. Round faces are not intended to have hairstyles over them, the girl said on my second last visit. `Should I have it all shaved off then, do you think?" I asked humbly. She thought about it seriously.
"I believe that would be worse," she said after some time.
My last visit was in November, the day of the US presidential election. I asked a stylist who she thought would win.
"I'm afraid I'm a very busy career woman," she said. "I have little time to speculate about tittle tattle like that."
They don't have any real magazines, they have laminated pictures of ludicrous minimalist hairstyles that won prizes on anorexic models at some championship.
"Don't look at those," I was warned. "Nothing there for you to get enthusiastic about."
I hope that this morning they'll come up with something new and horrific and make my day.
IF THERE'S time before lunch I might take my new hairdo up the Empire State Building again. It's open from 10 o'clock in the morning until 10 at night. Last time I went up in its amazing lift, two women, each with their eyes tightly shut, whispered to each other urgently. Thinking they were terrified I bent to hear what they were saying - one was telling the other about an affair she was having, and this was the only place they could escape from their husbands to talk.
They stayed away from the observation platforms and discussed the finer points of the drama and then in the fullness of time they came down again and joined two mild looking men.
"Did you enjoy it?" the man's face was kind. I kept hoping he wasn't the betrayed husband.
"Great thing about New York, you do much more here than you would on a Saturday morning anywhere else," said the faithless woman. She spoke only the truth.