“New York City Misses You Too.” It’s presumptuous but effective, as advertising slogans go, in that it prompted in me a nagging question: did I miss New York? If so, how much? Enough to do something about it?
The above legend was emblazoned across an illuminated billboard, skyscraper-tall, backed by a photo of Manhattan by night, lights atwinkle. I passed it on each occasion I took the Westway into central London and back home again—several times each week, during the months and, now, years following the peak of the pandemic. I had plenty of time to stare at it, to register the fact that circumstances in the travel industry remained so grave that even the second greatest city in the world was reduced to pleading, presumptuously or not, for British tourists to visit.
From the mid-1990s until five years ago, like so many people, I made regular pilgrimages to Manhattan— at least once or twice a year. Initially, entirely for pleasure. Then, for business and pleasure. Latterly, mostly for business. But in the period preceding the pandemic the trips became less frequent, and since 2018 I hadn’t been at all.
Feedback from those who had was not uniformly positive. Friends and colleagues, and some permanent residents, too, reported that the city seemed to have suffered more than most from the lockdowns and their aftermaths. The way they told it, the bagel had gone stale. New York, I was told, was tatty, bedraggled, even humbled. Hard to believe—and I didn’t, quite. But still my informants persisted: the subway was overrun by crazies; rats the size of sheepdogs had taken control of Central Park; and the whole place stank.
Frankly, this all seemed a bit rich to me: these were the same people who had complained for decades that New York had been gentrified into submission, Downtown had been Disneyfied, Brooklyn’s edge had been blunted. Now urban archivists who had long mythologised a lost demi-monde of junkie punk poets were holding their noses and coming over all suburban about... littering. What happened to the concrete jungle where dreams are made of?
Local press confirmed that New York is suffering. Crime is up. Rates of fatal overdoses are skyrocketing. An influx of tens of thousands of asylum seekers is putting an almighty strain on the public purse—and, it seemed to me from talking to friends there, the public patience. (Aren’t poor, huddled masses what New York was built on?) There is a housing drought and a glut of empty offices. Midtown is uncannily quiet compared to pre-pandemic levels, as people continue to work from home and businesses shutter or downsize or relocate. Tax revenue from commercial real estate has plummeted. The tech sector is in retreat. Adding idiocy to injury, to widespread consternation the mayor, Eric Adams, recently authorised a redesign of Milton Glaser’s iconic “I Heart NY” logo. (It now says “We Heart NYC”, in a sans-serif font, with a decidedly emoji-looking heart. In a word, it sucks.)
All desperate and depressing. But I confess, in my superficial way, that the thing that really hit home was that even my most elegantly dissolute Manhattanite friend, a perennial booster for the more dubious seductions of his adopted home, sounded defeated. Incredulity curdling into dismay, he told me that the dark art, at which he was a veteran practitioner, of scoring a last-minute reservation at the hottest restaurant, or a seat at the most exclusive bar, had lost its magic these days. It was too easy. The competition had either upped sticks for Westchester or retired into early-onset senescence. Perhaps, he suggested, those two are the same thing.
Everyone who remained, he said, voice dripping with glassy disdain, ate early and scuttled home to watch Netflix, as if they lived in Kansas or Ohio, rather than in what was once the greatest going-out city on Earth. (The hottest of hot new dining rooms in the West Village, where my friend lays his head, has the promising name Libertine. He reported that the place was packed but everyone was being scandalously well behaved.) Maybe, he suggested, I should come and see for myself, if only so he’d have someone to drink with, after hours?
I resisted. I could take his word for it. I had more than enough on my plate keeping London’s tottering hospitality industry afloat to lend a hand in someone else’s city. Especially at those prices.
Then, last spring, my wife decided she wanted to visit her friend, yet another former party person who’d lately quit the city (in her case for a big old doer-upper in Connecticut), and we should take the kids and make it our summer holiday. With all due respect to the Constitution State, I did not intend to spend my (our) summer holiday in Connecticut. Perhaps a couple of days there, a few days visiting other friends on Long Island, and either side of that: NYC?
Friends were sceptical. My wife was sceptical. I was sceptical. I’d never been to New York as a dad. I mean, I’ve been many times since I became a father, but I’ve never taken the kids with me. This would be a family holiday to a city I’ve only ever visited with less wholesome activities than sightseeing on my agenda. There would be no opening nights, no after-parties, no dive-bar lock-ins. What does a family of four do for fun in New York in the daytime?
I took advice. We should stay in Midtown (really?), because then you can walk to all the main attractions. When it came to those, you should book ahead, to avoid disappointment. Spontaneity has its place, but in New York, with the family in tow, you need to have a plan. Even, though I shudder at the word “itinerary”.
Twenty-plus years ago a regular bolthole of mine was 60 Thompson, on the edge of SoHo. It’s now part of a chain, owned by Hyatt. We booked into the Thompson Central Park, on West 56th Street. It maintains some of the spirit of Downtown—hidden behind a velvet curtain at the back of the lobby is a recreation of a grungy, graffitied burger joint (it’s called Burger Joint)—while offering the more chi-chi amenities one would expect of a luxury hotel. Our rooms were stylish and comfortable, service was warm and efficient, and the proximity to Fifth Avenue, Museum Mile and even Times Square turned out to be a boon.
New York City hotel rooms tend to be smaller than average, not only because space is at a premium but also because you’re in New York City: why would you spend any more time than necessary in your hotel room? (The old me—by which I really mean, the young me—would have had a smart-arse answer to that question, but he’s not here to argue.)
So, then, three full days in the city. Four people, all with wildly differing interests and priorities. Call me a curmudgeon, but I’m not, unlike Penelope (age 13), all that fussed about visiting the “biggest Sephora in the world”. Her mother, meanwhile, would rather be looking at contemporary art than researching and reporting a detailed list of the best pastrami sandwiches in the city, which is what Oscar (age 11)—and his gluttonous father—was focused on. (He was rewarded for his patience at the Guggenheim-Frick-Met-MoMA with an excitingly late-night screening of the latest Mission: Impossible.) Propping up the bar at Fanelli’s, on the corner of Mercer and Prince, will always be among my most cherished New York activities, but I must begrudgingly accept that daytime drinking in darkened watering holes is not the summer holiday the rest of the family was hoping for. (They got sun, sea and sand later in the week, in the Hamptons.)
And yet, despite all the kvetching and schlepping, there were moments of unexpected harmony, and these were a joy. Wandering Dimes Square with Penelope, on a sweltering afternoon, checking out the latest outpost of Lower East Side cool, drinking bubble tea, getting her nails done in a Korean place, checking out vintage T-shirts and second- hand books. A morning jumping in and out of cabs with Oscar, shopping for merch—Mets hat for him, trainers for me—while snacking on strawberry-liquorice twists from Russ & Daughters. Dirty Martinis in the bar of the Thompson with Danielle while, safely upstairs in bed, the kids watched Idris kicking arse, or perhaps ass, on Apple TV.
All four of us walked the length of the High Line on a sultry evening, from Hudson Yards through Chelsea and down to the Meatpacking District, where we watched the sun sink behind the skyline from the roof of the Gansevoort Hotel, while eating sushi from the outdoor omasake bar at Saishin.
All four of us lined up at the counter of the terrific S&P sandwich shop, opposite the Flatiron, being thoroughly spoilt by the funny young staff. All four of us enjoyed the view from the top of the Empire State Building. (Honestly, who knew?) And then a triumphant visit to a Broadway show, Wicked. (It really is.)
Yes, we saw crazies on the Subway. Yes, we saw rats in the park. Yes, we smelt weed wherever we walked. Not in a good way. Yes, it was clear that in recent years the city has taken knocks. Who hasn’t? And isn’t that yet another reason to declare, in solidarity: We Heart New York?
Our last night, a Friday, we went for cheeseburgers at JG Melon on the Upper East Side. The line outside was forbidding but the charming man on the door took pity on the hungry British kids and their hectored British parents and guided us through the throng to a prime table for four at the back. The place was buzzing, and I happily blew a week’s wages on another round of drinks and desserts. (Not going to lie, as Penelope says, New York right now is expensive.)
There’s a new billboard on the Westway, a pink background behind an image of the Statue of Liberty. New slogan, too: “It’s time for New York City.”
It’s funny how the roles reverse between child and parent as the years jostle along but that’s kind of how they are now between me and mine. Coming from a small village in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, my mother immigrated to Great Britain in the 1970s in search of a better life. Till then, she had the back-breaking job of selling Hakka-Chinese food along Calcutta’s streets, a position she’d held since the age of six to support her family. Eventually came a golden ticket to relocate, and the SGD12 she’d saved up would kick start a new life. That, in the UK though, was spare change. Mummy would have to hustle much harder.
By the time I was born, my mum was juggling two gruelling jobs. During the day, she worked in a Chinese restaurant and come night she worked in a hospital. She’d sleep on the shop floor before it opened, and somehow still managed to meal prep for two kids before the night shift. To help, I became the model teenager any Asian immigrant could hope for: I got straight As at school, and spent all my spare time helping out at the restaurant—that’s a lot of prawn crackers packaged. We knew nothing of family recreation and I often wondered how my white friends had time to go to theme parks or the beach with their parents.
When I was at university, Mum and I experienced luxury for the first time. We had relatives in town and they booked a table at China Tang, a restaurant in Park Lane’s most famous hotel called The Dorchester. I remember that day so clearly: Mum pulled the labels off her most expensive (high street brand) clothes, we posed for photos in the lobby for what felt like forever and every bite of dim sum was savoured with a squeal. When the bill came our hearts jumped but we talked about that incredible experience for years to come and I vowed one day to take her back to that hotel myself.
My 20s were a blur. You know that time when you’re chasing promotions, are all consumed by first love and going to parties every night because your liver can perform magic tricks? I didn’t visit often while I found my way in the world as an adult. As my 30s entered I was living abroad and Mum visited me in a handful of cities. It was in Tokyo, though, that I noticed she couldn’t quite keep up. I’d walk ahead while she limped behind and climbing the stairs became a challenge. She was in her 70s, and I’d failed to really acknowledge her fragility, mostly because I was in denial. We easily label our parents old, but rarely do we see them as weak. Certainly not my busy-body single mother who can hold down multiple jobs, raise children, and eventually amass a small fortune in real estate. A health scare ensued and I realised I needed to dedicate much more quality time with my mum.
Now, I’d never before considered her to be a travel companion. We have very different tastes. I like outdoor adventure, and she prefers shopping malls; I like experimenting with local food, and she complains when the meals are not Asian, because "if there’s no rice, she’ll be hungry"; and of course, there’s the nagging, which is incessant, to say the least. Still, once a year, I plan an international adventure for us, and admittedly it’s always more fun than I anticipated. We recently journeyed to South Korea, but it’s the cruises we enjoy most because both of us can have our needs met. On a Virgin Voyage around Greece, I could have vegan while she did Korean barbecue, and we checked off multiple islands without the stress of public transit. This summer we’re sailing on a Norwegian Cruise Line to Iceland. It’s the best way for her to see the fjords and the Northern Lights from the comfort of her own balcony.
We’re dining quite fancy once a month too, and it’s about damn time. I see it as a small contribution to making up for a complete absence of indulgence in the first 70+ years of her life. This is someone who scoffed plates down between shifts, and never once took a self-care day. Now, I want her to slow down and enjoy life’s bounty—and of course, I’ll settle the bill. She can’t comprehend the marked-up price of rice in a nice restaurant, despite that being her main stipulation for dining out.
The average person in the world lives till they’re 73 years old (83 in Singapore), so it’s easy to do the math to figure out how many more Lunar celebrations or annual vacations you’ll possibly have with your parents. For most millennials, it isn’t that many at all. My mum turns 80 in 2024, and I know exactly how to mark the special occasion. We’re going to have dim sum at China Tang and she’s going to stay overnight in The Dorchester for the first time. It’s quite a splurge but I’ve been saving. Every year with her is precious and honestly, I wish I’d started doing this much earlier.
I have lived in the same apartment block for more than a decade. Real estate being as it is in this country, especially in the city where I live, everyone here is holding. Not one of the owners has sold in the entire time I’ve been here. We have watched one another grow up, settle down, have kids. The carpets smell like 1976. It is a time capsule in concrete.
A few years ago, my upstairs neighbour died. This is a polite way of saying he dropped dead of a heart attack, out of nowhere, and they still haven’t figured out why. I really loved this neighbour. He had always been so thoughtful and generous with me. He was only a few years past 40.
At his wake—which, for some reason, was vastly more upsetting to me than my own father’s funeral—they played "All My Friends" by LCD Soundsystem. Perhaps for the first time, death no longer felt like an abstract concept. It didn’t just happen to people beyond retirement age; the old, infirm and grey. Someone had died who adored the same music I did. He was older than me, but we were part of the same generation. I had never considered my own mortality before, but now, as LCD frontman James Murphy sang the same refrain over and over, and men cried quietly into their lagers as they stared out at the sea, it was all I could think about.
Culturally, men are less likely than women to ruminate on their own mortality, but we are preternaturally obsessed with the idea of legacy. Some of the most famous men in history (Napoleon, Alexander the Great, 50 Cent) spent much of their lives thinking about what would happen after they died and how they would be remembered, even though, at least from what I can ascertain, they never actually considered how and when they might die. Even regular, everyday men like me retain trace elements of this sort of ego. We talk about ancient, irrelevant ideas like ‘family lines’ and ‘lineage’. We fast-forward to the statues of us erected in public squares, the memorial plaques detailing our achievements, forgetting the bit where we stop breathing.
The very fact that we’re more likely to indulge ourselves in risky, dangerous behaviour shows we seldom entertain the notion of death, at least not seriously. No doubt, this in part influences why we typically die younger than women. It’s not called a "never-say-die" attitude by mistake. Yet I often think about it now. It creeps into my subconscious, mostly during mundane parts of the day, this corporeality. I notice my body more. I consider the very real prospect of its deletion, and that I ultimately have very little control over when or how this happens. I consider how annoying it will be for my next of kin to sell my vinyl collection and my many hardback books.
I suspect this dawning understanding of the finiteness of life is not unrelated to becoming a parent for the first time, in seeing aspects of yourself reborn as a new entity. Major milestones such as this typically correspond with the age at which men draft wills. But I’m less interested in the logistics of one’s life ending than in what it actually means. Though I am (hopefully) nowhere near dying, I find the inevitability of death for all of us fascinating. What will it mean when my first friend dies? Will I die first or will my partner? How will my family and social networks shift and change over time, rendering previously permanent structures impermanent?
Dad would be a good person to talk to about death, except that he never really talked about it. I was too young in any case, barely midway through my twenties when he passed. It was a bulletproof age. I smoked imported cigarettes. I drove recklessly. Took drugs. Had unprotected sex. When you are so pumped full of life, fingertips almost crackling with it, death is the last thing you want to talk about, and your old man is the last person you want to discuss it with.
My father was a GP, which means he wasn’t interfacing with death every day, but he still encountered it regularly. He sent patients off to hospital for scans that revealed they had tumours. On the way back to his car each evening, he stopped in and made the rounds of the local nursing home, where many were in a protracted state of decline, usually from dementia. Some of his other patients were heroin addicts; not all of them survived.
I thought Dad was old then, but he wasn’t, really. He had just been haunted and dying the whole time, right in front of me. At 36, I am already older than he was when he had me. After he died, three of my good friends’ fathers passed away in quick succession. The ones with cancer went slow, the ones that took their own lives vanished in an instant. Because it had happened to me first, I became an unofficial counsellor to them, a bunch of men in our late twenties, suddenly all very concerned with death.
Marcus Aurelius, the 2nd-century Roman emperor and stoic philosopher once again in vogue with self-help podcasters the world over, posited that knowing life could end tomorrow influences how you live it today. And while the deaths of those closest to me (whether familial or proximal) made me question how I move through the world, I would argue that what it really granted me was a level of empathy that I didn’t naturally have before. To make life less about my own mental state, in the traditional Stoic sense, and more about the mental state of those around me. Dad would have had a lot to say about this, I think.
I think about my neighbour every time I pass his widow and their gorgeous black dog on our staircase. He clearly left a lasting impression on the people around him, though I doubt he ever spent any time planning or thinking about his own funeral. My father famously hadn’t taken out life insurance when he died. We all live forever, until we don’t.
It took a long time for me to be able to listen to "All My Friends" again. It’s a song about being stuck between what you want to do and what you should do. It’s a song about regret, about the transience of friendships. But mostly it’s a song about ageing, which my neighbour never had the chance to do. James Murphy released it when he was 36—my age—as a reflection on the best years of his life. What if they had also been the final years of his life? Would the song have sounded different?
Either way, it’s possible Murphy would have written that famous refrain in exactly the same way: where are your friends tonight? This, ultimately, is what facing death has made me truly understand. Your best and only life is never just about you.
