I think I might stay in Manhattan, after all.

On deadline, but just can’t get my head around my piece. I had a lunch today on the Upper East Side, and another writer there had 1500 words to file for tomorrow morning too, yet she & I were the last to leave, at 5 o’clock, after picking over the bones with our host. Typical journalists.

Really I shouldn’t have gone out at all but when an invitation from my most erudite & charming New York friend appeared in my inbox to “a small lunch I’m having for Barry Humphries & Lizzie Spender on my terrace”, I felt refusal would have been, well, churlish. Fourteen of us (including ravishing Angelica Huston) ate delicious grilled vegetables, German sausages and salad under huge umbrellas in the 95F heat, before convening on the shaded side of the wraparound terrace to eat melon & chocolate cake & to listen to various of the bold-face guests tell anecdotes about other equally bold-face names.

After a week of vacillation and hideous introspection*, this weekend has been so packed with distractions that it’s hard to believe I was debating the wisdom of my flight to America. J’s Baby Shower was charming (certainly not a given when ten women are in the same room), filled with flowers, scrumptious food and genuine goodwill (& very tiny socks). Then to the roof terrace at Soho House to meet BA, & where SE was coincidentally working his way poolside through the Pimms in proper English boy-drinking-fashion. But, best of all, BA turned out to be a proper kindred spirit, a fashion industry girl with beauty, balls & brains who, like me, thinks that a supper of salad, French fries, ketchup & mayo, washed down with three raspberry martinis is a perfectly nutritious and sensible meal.

*I suddenly wondered where the phrase 'hideous introspection' came from. Upon research it appears to be from ‘The Turn of the Screw’