GOD BLESS OUR HOME(S)

Jonny’s connection, Ben Carton (he was the seriously attractive man who spoke American at our farewell brunch), arranged for us to squat in his mother’s apartment on the Upper West Side until the end of February. Let’s just say that we live in remarkable turn-of-the-century (the nineteenth, that is) splendour. Ben’s father was an avant-garde abstract painter, who worked in Picasso’s Paris studio for five years after the Second World War, and there are three or four Picassos in the apartment, all done specially for Carton père.

The apartment building, called The Belnord, is a flagship building on the west side of Central Park, and is only three blocks away from it, in line with the southern end of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. About 30% of it is rent-controlled, and apartments not subject to this most civilised of city laws go for about $17 000 a month.

The Belnord, seen from the corner of Broadway and West 86th Street


The Belnord's courtyard. In New York, one can be anything. Sometimes I am Mrs Astor...

(Good God, I’ve just spotted the most obese human being five feet away in the Starbucks. I’ll avert mine eyes… Fittingly, he’s sitting at the table reserved for disabled people. As Charlotte said about Jackie May’s belly the day before Georgia was born: “You could have had a cheese-and-wine party on that stomach.”)

On the first Sunday after we arrived, we took the tube/metro/underground (what do they call it here? “Subway” refers to a take-away chain, but I think that is indeed what they call it) to Brooklyn to start house hunting. We had more or less decided in advance that we wouldn’t be able to afford to live on Manhattan and have space for guests, so Brooklyn it was going to be.

We started off in Crown Heights and weaved our way through Bedford-Stuyvesant towards Park Slope. We were both really polite about the first two neighbourhoods (which were ghastly) – I suppose because we thought there was a real chance that we would have to make a life there. The streets were wide and the buildings low and bleak – a bit like East Berlin in 1992 – extremely unattractive.

By the time we got to Grand Army Plaza at the edge of Park Slope I knew there was no way I could live in any other area. And then Claire Wright and Graeme Simpson came to the rescue.

597 Carroll Street Apartment 1, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11215

The mother of a classmate of Jake Simpson’s advertised a floor in their house, just among the parents in Jake’s class, and we went to look at it on the same day we trawled through those depressing working-class neighbourhoods. It was not our first choice because it has only one-and-a-half bedrooms, but it is in Park Slope, three blocks from the park and completely renovated (a “gut renovation” they call it here); also, two days later we saw four hideous apartments that were all more expensive than the one that’s now ours, so we decided to bite the bullet and take it. It’s about two streets from Graeme and Claire, which is another plus.

At least we had the pleasure of meeting Larry, the biggest caricature of the gross estate agent I have ever come across, who took us to see the first three apartments. He drives a huge Chrysler something, with his pudgy diamond-ringed hand flat against the steering wheel. He’s short, with thinning grey hair and a synthetic jacket that peels at the collar. He shouts into three mobiles at the same time, and is a rude bastard to all his callers.

“What’s a ‘walkthrough’?” I ask.

“We talk outside. I meet you at the car. I’ll show you a walkthrough,” is his response.

Swine. I’m so pleased we didn’t have to rent anything through him. I had to give him the evil eye right at the beginning already, just to get him remotely in line. And that line was bloody crooked.

597 Carroll Street. Our apartment is the one that should be called "ground floor", but because everything is higher and bigger and better in America, it's on the first floor