A common or garden Manhattan Saturday

Going back to London always seems to involve a day spent running around Manhattan like a freak buying presents, running errands and searching out esoterica. I haven’t stopped moving for the past seven hours and my feet hurt.

As does my left shin which is purple & red & looks like I have been whacked with a big stick, courtesy of an extremely heavy crate which fell on it from up on high in my storage container. The box contains all the clips and tears of my work from the magazines & newspapers I have worked on over the past ten years, so I can truthfully say that my leg was savaged by my career. Nice.

After that, along with hundreds of pieces of paper, I gathered up what remained of my dignity (there had been quite a lot of cursing and then snuffly weeping with pain), and limped off to the High Line elevated park a block away for a sit down, carrying the bag of coats & shoes from storage that I deem necessary for braving an English summer.

Then it was off to blissful Strand Books to poke around the cookery section, and find a good book for the flight back to London: nothing worse than being reliant on airport bookshops, especially the one at Newark. (I bought AS Byatt's Shadow of the Sun - I really wanted The Children's Book, but it's not out here 'till October - and The Likeness by Tana French, having been gripped by her debut novel, In The Woods.)

I’ve also managed to tick off the Old Bay Seasoning that Tim Hayward begged for over Twitter, my sister & mother’s birthday presents (Tuesday & Weds respectively), shoot a whole load of clips for my Fashionair Style Diary and spend an hour or so mentally furnishing my dream house in ABC Carpet & Home.

Kind of a perfect day really. Apart from the bruised shin of course.