Sex and the City

"New York, New York, it's a helluva town,
The Bronx is up and the Battery's down "

Been here for four days,and I still don't know where the plain women hang out. Seriously: there's something unusual when the ugliest crowd you see are the people at the Apple store standing in line to buy iPhones.

After work,the bars fill up with groups of well turned out women, and I feel like an extra in Sex and the City. Around my hotel, yellow cabs dispense them in threes and fours, like money from cash machines.

There are gay men around, and gay women - I'm on the edge of Chelsea and Greenwich Village. Where are the groups of straight men? In another part of town, possibly with the plain girls. Here,they're outnumbered five-to-one.

Two blondes talking with a brunette friend about the man the brunette's been seeing. She likes him, but he's married. Still, she can let him buy her dinner, can't she?

I got into a conversation with a lovely girl who recognised my accent, and told me she'd recently had her heart broken by a man from London. No, she said, she doesn't hate men. She doesn't even hate British men. She just hates him. He dumped her a few weeks ago. She has a date tonight. I wish her luck.

At my hotel, one of the receptionists is showing off a book she's had published. It's about her experiences as a self-destructive teenage punk rock fan. Or as the book calls her, a Death Rock Cutter, which sounds like a spaceship in Star Wars. Still,the book looks very arty.

I walk around the corner to Starbucks, and pass a shoe shop called Shoegasm.They don't seem to stock much for men. Another part of town. Another part of town.

"There are eight million stories in the Naked City"