'Just a New York conversation / Rattlin' through my mind.'

Source: MJA Smith

'Just a New York conversation / Rattlin' through my mind.'

- Lou Reed, 'New York Telephone Conversation', Transformer (1975)

'Bless you.'

- Bryant Park, Saturday afternoon

'Bless you,' said the woman sat on one of the metal chairs scattered around Bryant Park, reading the Saturday papers and wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses to shield her eyes from the warm April sun. My wife had just sneezed, and the woman had looked up from her paper as we walked past, smiled and said 'bless you'. In uttering those two words, New York City, where we'd arrived a couple of hours before, seemed suddenly less oppressive, more friendly somehow.

'I should go to a museum, a gallery or something, I know; but when you live in New York, when it rains you just stay indoors and, I don't know, do the cleaning or something.'

- Rock Center Café, Saturday evening

We were sat in the Rock Center Café, watching a mix of flamboyant wannabes and hopeless amateurs skating on the ice rink at Rockefeller Center, on the rink's last day until next winter. At one point the ice was cleared and a guy proposed to his fiancee; we have to assume she said yes. Everyone clapped.

After a dinner of crab cakes and seasonal vegetables, the girls went out with Mrs S to watch the skating, where a guy looking like Che Guevara was impressing and irritating the other skaters by turns with some quirky dancing. Paying the bill, I got chatting to the waiter, a big, cuddly sort of a guy with a friendly demeanour, no trace of snootiness in spite of the WASPy clientele at other tables. I explained we'd just arrived in New York from two weeks in Orlando. He told me he used to work at Disney World. I wasn't terribly surprised to hear that.

In exchange for his tip, I asked him if he could recommend anywhere in New York to take children. In response, he proudly reeled off a whole list of places and then took me over to a waitress, herself a mother to a son, who offered up some more places - the American Museum Of Natural History is the only one that springs to mind now - and the guy wrote some of them down on the back of a receipt. All of the places were already on our list of things we wanted to see or do while we were in the city, but it was the easy conversation and friendliness that made that post-dinner chat memorable.

'You wan' lox-cream cheese or lox AND cream cheese?'

- Cafe Europa, W33 Street

- Pergola, W40 Street

- Montague Street Bagels, Montague Street, Brooklyn

- Ess-A-Bagel, Third Avenue

Never ask for salmon. Well, not unless you want the server to give you a stern, uncomprehending stare and the brusque question above.

We ate bagels a few times while in New York. You have to really, and it's hard to go wrong. The best bagels we had? They were from Montague Street Bagels over in Brooklyn, eaten on a bench on the pretty esplanade overlooking Manhattan's Financial District, watching bankers, sundry execs and tourists taking helicopters from a helipad at the island's southern tip. On the night before we flew home, Daughter 2 and I cut across town to Ess-A-Bagel, a deli over on Third Avenue, whose bagels are highly recommended by locals. It turns out that they weren't a patch on Montague Street in Brooklyn, and we managed to lose Mrs S and Daughter 2 when we tried to regroup, instilling a momentary panic given that Manhattan suddenly felt very large indeed.

'Do you like poetry?'

- John's, W44 Street

We were in John's Pizzeria near Times Square, ordering a take-out pizza after a trip to a cinema on W42 Street. It was late and the kids wanted to be in bed, but we were hungry and John's was just around the corner from the hotel. This used to be the Midtown branch of the gruff Village location but is now totally separate. Mrs S and I had been to John's on Bleecker Street before the kids were born, so we had high hopes for the pizza here.

'Do you like poetry?' asked the young guy at the booth who took our takeaway order. By this time Mrs S and the girls were sat down on a banquette, waiting, and I was looking at the restaurant's business card, half-wondering why I pick these things up. The question caught me off guard and I didn't quite know if he was talking to me.

'Sure,' I responded. 'Sometimes.'

'I write poetry. I wrote a poem earlier. Could I read it to you?'

When I agreed, thinking how wonderfully odd this was, he read a short poem written on a scrap of paper, called 'Norway', which he'd been inspired to write after serving a young couple from that country about an hour before. After he'd finished, he meticulously explained what each line meant. I forget the message now, but it lead him on to tell me how committed he was to his studies and his academic endeavours. He gestured at the rest of the wait staff, telling me that they were all wannabe actors or performers, that he thought it was all fake and that few people wanted to make something of themselves through hard work and commitment. I wished him well, told him that being able to write was a gift, gave him my email address after encouraging him to seek a publisher, and left, thinking how typically New York it was to have that conversation.

'Children are people too!'

- Sixth Avenue

In a city of eight million people, seeing the same person twice is weird, let alone statistically mind-bending.

This utterance was hurled at us twice from a talkative black homeless guy on Sixth Avenue on a corner somewhere between Central Park and Radio City, in response to the four of us striding along the sidewalk. The second time he said it, toward the end of our stay, I turned back and offered him a smile. He returned my smile with a massive grin, a wink and a gentle shake of the polysterene coffee cup filled with quarters he was holding.

'It's good to still be here.'

- Other Music, E4 Street

That's what the dude behind the counter in Other Music said to me when I said how pleased I was that this East Village institution was still there. In the days before writing this section we've learned that independent record store Bleecker Bob's in Greenwich had closed its doors forever. Indie record shops in cities across the globe are shutting down as the influence of downloads and retailers like Amazon deliver a more instant response to our music-consuming needs. At least in 2012, Other Music was still there. I truly hope they'll still be there when we return to New York this year.

We'd walked into Other Music after I took Daughter 1 into the John Varvartos store on the Bowery. That trendy outlet is the site of the old CBGB venue. I wanted to take her there for several reasons, one being that she loves my CBGB t-shirt, and another being that from an early age I've been conditioning her to New York punk via Talking Heads, Blondie and others. I have some great video footage of her headbanging along to the first Ramones album, and Television's Marquee Moon was, for a while, her favourite album in her iPod. The former CBGBs was a curiously soulless place, the barest trace of the bastion of New York's music scene to be found in the exposed brickwork, no dirt or grit or energy among the racks of trendy clothes. Another reason for nipping in here was because of a well-publicised display of vintage vinyl. Considering the former venue was the revolution against bloated Seventies rock, seeing loads of LPs by godawful bands that the NY punk scene deliberately rejected was thoroughly dispiriting. As was the burly security guard breathing down our necks.

So Other Music was like a welcome relief when we walked in. I specifically wanted to buy Hurry Up, We're Dreaming by M83. Being far too untrendy to know my way round the modern musical maze of stratified sub-genres, I asked someone stacking new releases onto the shelves to point me in the right direction and she was really friendly and helpful, something you'll never get when shopping on Amazon.

'Do you need some directions?'

- Bleecker Street

We weren't especially lost, that was the thing. We'd been walking round Greenwich Village for most of the morning and had been enjoying exploring the wonky streets and haunts of Beats and other cool people from the Fifties and Sixties, looking for houses once lived in by Dustin Hoffmann and Bob Dylan, looking down the road pictured on the sleeve of Dylan's The Freewheelin Bob Dylan, drinking excellent cappuccinos in Caffe Reggio and watching people playing chess in Washington Square Park. A friendly man, with shopping bags and a beaming smile saw us meandering down Bleecker past the red canopy of the Village Vanguard, the important jazz venue that witnessed many an important gig in jazz's heyday, and he assumed we were struggling to navigate the complexity of the streets compared to the rest of Manhattan. He's clearly never been to London.

That said, it is a little confusing in the Village, and he seemed so keen, and almost proud, to help that we didn't want to say no. At that point we were on our way to the original Magnolia Bakery to buy lavish cupcakes that would later be consumed on the High Line in the shadow of the Standard hotel. He gestured down the street, gave us the directions and he then walked off, smiling and evidently pleased to have assisted some tourists trying really hard not to look like tourists. An elderly lady in Brooklyn on Montague Street had also gone out of her way to see if we needed directions while trying to find the bagel shop, whereas earlier that day when we gingerly approached two traffic cops to ask for directions on how to get onto the Brooklyn Bridge they were smilingly obliging, which was a relief of sorts. I thought they were going to arrest me for being so lost.

'It's our best selling item.'

- A Salt And Battery, Greenwich Avenue

Immediately before bumping into the helpful shopper by the Vanguard, we went for lunch at one of the most baffling places we've come across in New York - A Salt And Battery, an authentic fish and chip shop in the Village, owned and staffed by English people. Sitting in the window eating sustainable white fish and chips from little baskets while looking out onto the quiet streets, and hearing the steady stream of English and Irish accents of queuing customers, it felt like being back home perhaps, even though we don't normally go to the chippy very often.

Talking to the guy behind the counter, a warm guy that I swore was a dead ringer for Jack Whitehall, I alighted upon a poster advertising that deep-fried Cadbury Cream Eggs were back in stock. He explained that it was the most popular thing on the menu, which I was slightly aghast at. I took a photo of the poster and emailed it to a friend in Edinburgh, the message saying that I thought he'd be really proud to see Scottish cuisine making it to New York.

'Well, because you asked so politely... I love the English accent!''

'Do you like Only Fools And Horses?'

- Tony's di Napoli, W43 Street

We had decided to go back to Tony's di Napoli just off Times Square, regarded as one of the best family-run Italian restaurants in the city. We'd been there on the Saturday, and with no other plans for dinner, and it having been a massive hit with the girls (and us), we decided to go back. Previously we'd booked, but this time we were going in on spec, and having seen the hard-faced hostess brusquely managing the pre-theatre crowd a few days before, I was a little nervous. I needn't have worried, but in being a little apprehensive I enquired of the (different) hostess with a bit more pronounced politeness (remember 'please' and 'thank you' are not common currencies in NYC) as to whether we could have a table of four and despite being every bit as stern-looking as her colleague, her face suddenly lit up and she became really friendly. Perhaps I'm a little too conscious and embarrassed by my Englishness sometimes, and I clearly forget that people like to hear the accent when you're abroad, especially in the US.

The appeal of our accents seemed to prevail as we were taken to our table downstairs. After ordering drinks, including a fantastic Negroni for me, our waiter took over the table. I can't remember what he looked like now, but in my mind he reminds me of a blend of Adam Buxton and Carrie's writer boyfriend Jack Berger in Sex And The City. Asking us if we liked Only Fools And Horses in a Brooklyn accent was singularly one of the most unexpected things we heard in New York. It turned out his mother was English and so he'd been raised watching the sitcom, but even if that was an entirely logical question for him to ask, it was still pretty crazy to us. We all enjoyed our pasta and it's no surprise that we'll be going back there again in May; we won't, on the other hand, be going back to Carmine's on the Upper West Side, which we went to on our last day, and which was nowhere near as nice.

'Are you going to American Girl?'

- American Girl, Fifth Avenue

'Are you going to American Girl?' asked a former work colleague when we popped into our firm's New York office to say hello. The question was aimed at Daughter 1 and 2, who had been a bit grumpy and unruly for most of the afternoon. It was our last day, we'd been away for the best part of three weeks, and the week of walking around New York was beginning to take its toll. A few minutes before, we'd gone through the usual parental cycle of warnings that if they misbehaved we'd have to take away the thing they'd been innocently looking forward to most about New York; that thing was a trip to the American Girl store on Fifth Avenue, and we'd been talking about it for months.

So the question left us in a tricky position, since they seemed to take the enquiry as somehow meaning that, despite our warnings, the nice lady had given them permission to go. And of course we acquiesced, looked terribly inconsistent, and roughly three hours later we walked out of American Girl carrying two dolls and a couple of outfits with two very smug and satisfied young children. The dolls were promptly christened Lily and Jessica, or Mortgage #1 and Mortgage #2 as I call them. Another father in the queue and I shared our amazement at the audacious cost, but handed over our credit cards anyway. When the girls feel like it, they dress them and brush Lily and Jessica's hair lovingly. When they don't we tell them they're bad parents and that the dolls should be put up for adoption.

The Bryant Park Hotel

Source: TripAdvisor

A weekend Facebook post from the Bryant Park Hotel in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, words to the effect that their staff had not worked and that the hotel had no guests, made me realise that I'd not written the positive review of this hotel that I'd meant to pull together after our stay in April of this year.

My wife and two daughters (5 and 4) spent a week at the Bryant Park Hotel after a fortnight enjoying theme parks in Orlando. The original intention of the stay in New York was to be a week spent enjoying the city, doing more 'adult' things after two weeks of the comparative unreality of Florida. As it happens, our two girls enjoyed endlessly walking round Manhattan and Brooklyn every bit as much as we did. Their prior knowledge of New York's unique topography has been informed by the number of pictures, prints and books about the city in our house and from seeing landmarks in films. But one of the things that made their enjoyment of New York so strong was the hotel itself.

The Bryant Park Suite we had overlooking Bryant Park in the former American Radiator Building was modern, clean, spacious and functional without feeling too minimal. My eldest daughter slept on the day bed in the window of the lounge while my youngest slept on a foldaway bed a good few feet away. Despite the lounge being converted into a kids' bedroom, it remained spacious and uncluttered throughout our stay, and we made good use of the sofas and dining table, including one night eating take-out pizza from John's at Times Square, and occasional breakfast pastries from Pret or the patisserie across the other side of the park. Every morning and evening the kids would rush to the window to look out at the huddled skyscrapers of Midtown, the changing colours of the spire of the Bank of America tower, the deep canyon of Fifth Avenue and the people sitting .at tables in the park or at the long benches visible through the windows at the rear of the Library. To say they were enthralled by New York's vibrancy would be a gross understatement, and we would all go to sleep at night with the city's buzz pleasantly in our ears.

If the suite was perfect enough, our stay was made all the better by the staff at the hotel. When we arrived at the hotel from JFK, we were greeted at the door by Ryan, with whom we spoke every day, talking about what we were going to be doing that day and his readiness for and apprehension over the birth of his daughter; at the desk we were checked in by Chase, a really friendly guy who went out of his way to greet us with a smile and a massive good morning every day we saw him; and then there was Sarah at guest services who my youngest daughter struck up a friendship with and who she would rush to see whenever we passed through reception, Sarah on the last day fussing over the American Girl dolls my two girls had twisted my arm to buy. These three people were among the friendliest we've ever encountered as a family, and the fact that I still remember them so fondly six months on is testament to that. I can't thank them enough for how welcoming and friendly they were - particularly in a trendy hotel that's not necessarily best-known as a destination for families with two small and very excited children.

The Bryant Park is not a cheap hotel, but then again nowhere is in New York. Nevertheless, its location right in the centre of Midtown, effortless stylishness and general atmosphere are worth paying for. I took one trip to the basement bar and the crowd on a midweek evening was a cool mix of office workers and über-hip young adults; one evening we came back from a long day's schlepping round the streets to find a huge queue at the door of the hotel. After skipping right past the line thanks to being residents, we asked what was going on. The security guard, an intimidating but cheerful guy, told me there were two events that evening, an NFL Draft party and a private fashion show up in the penthouse. At the time it seemed perfectly normal, both for New York and for the Bryant Park, but looking back now it seems otherworldly.

Staying a week in New York is, it seems, relatively uncommon. People tend to spend a weekend or a few days and strike the main landmarks off the 'must-do' list. After our week-long stay and our return to the UK, we resolved to go back again, feeling like we had what we've described as 'unfinished business' in the city, and will be heading back to Manhattan again next May. For us it would be unimaginable not to stay at the faultless Bryant Park Hotel again, and so that's exactly where we will be heading to next year. It cannot come soon enough.

Once again, my thanks to the staff mentioned above for making our stay so enjoyable.

A Chance Encounter (c1996 - 2011)

A Chance Encounter is a short story that I have been writing and rewriting on and off for about sixteen years, but which I never quite finished. While I was at university I decided that I wanted to write, and set about pulling together short stories, recording my dreams and noting down ideas. Sadly, I don't think that any of those inchoate scribbles exist today, but one idea did make it through, which was the notion for A Chance Encounter. Unusually, I've never changed the title despite how long I've been writing it for (normally the original title and the final title are quite different), and the concept itself is - with a few minor exceptions - not that different from the first, incomplete draft that I still have knocking about on my hard drive. This is the third or fourth - and definitely final - version of this story, and the only one that I've completed.

A Chance Encounter describes an unexpected meeting between an angel and a victim of a horrific train crash. I can no longer recall what inspired this originally, but in the final version I wrote from scratch this year, there's a degree of cynicism about bureaucracy which may or may be a reflection of having been working for thirteen of the sixteen years that have elapsed since I started this.

You can read A Chance Encounter by clicking here.

A Canary Wharf Sunday

Source: MJA Smith

Above ground, Canary Wharf's spires of commerce are a thing to behold. The cluster of tall office and residential buildings on London's former docks has a Stateside feel, evoking the design of a more clinically utopian take on Manhattan's Financial District - though the buildings are far, far smaller. Unlike the City, just around the bend in the Thames, the streets and buildings of Canary Wharf are resolutely planned; the City, in contrast, is confusing to me even after ten years of working there, the street pattern having evolved into a seemingly random and inexplicable web of alleys, short dead-end streets and passageways over many centuries. The City's architecture is more austere, mostly stone; the newer glass and steel structures provide jagged aspects of juxtaposed modernity, taller structures nestled up against older buildings, sometimes conspicuously, sometimes comfortably.

Around Canary Wharf, old architecture is hard to find, and fast disappearing. Beneath the shade of the State Street building at Churchill Place, the old Fulton umbrella warehouse is now a pile of part-demolished, twisted metal. In a neighbouring street to where we were staying at New Providence Wharf, we found a row of three of four old workers' cottages, common to nearby Poplar or Greenwich, but against the backdrop of the Ontario Tower and the emerging Swan Streamlight they just looked like vestigial appendages, long since abandoned by architectural evolution and ambition. Billingsgate Market, with its spindly spider's legs cradling the main market hall, looks dated and threatened by the bulk of the nearby HSBC tower, itself one of the few buildings at Canary Wharf with curves rather than sharp, precise edges.

Below ground, Canary Wharf is a confusing web of malls and subterranean access points to the office buildings above. Escalators, elevators and passageways are the principal means of movement here. Doors open automatically into service tunnels and further below still a network of car parks extend far under the waterline. Everything is bathed in fluorescent light and after a while you wonder what natural daylight looks like.

There are two sets of shopping malls at Canary Wharf – Cabot Square and Jubilee Place. Both have the slightly surreal effect of making you feel like you're in a vast airport departure lounge, and the shops are dominated by the upmarket brands that proliferate and thrive at international terminals. I spent some time with Daughter#2 here one Sunday in January; we were in London for the weekend, and on that day Mrs S and Daughter#1 went off to the O2 to watch Strictly Come Dancing. Faced with what turned out to be nearly four hours walking round those glistening corporate catacombs, we took the DLR and headed over to Greenwich instead, providing a welcome relief from tunnel living.

On that particular cold, damp Sunday, the main draw of Greenwich was its vast Royal Park, which I always find more interesting than Hyde Park over in the west, thanks to its rolling hills and the predominance of the imposing Observatory, to which Daughter#2 and I ascended. In this there is a beautiful irony – you escape Canary Wharf's clinical atmosphere only to purposefully take in the breathtaking view of the vast corporate palaces and sleek apartment buildings from the summit of the Observatory hill. Somewhere beneath those towers, I reflected to myself, are those malls and boutiques I'd chosen to escape from that weekend. You'd never believe they could really be there.

There is a great kids' playground in the park, which Daughter#2 thoroughly enjoyed to the point of I-don't-want-to-leave-yet-daddy-waaaaaaahhhhh tantrums that only precocious, unselfconscious two year old girls can produce. Writing this it occurs to me that Canary Wharf is almost entirely denuded of things that would appeal to children, with the possible exception of Wagamama. Heading back to the retail malls when being outdoors got too cold, and before I spent too much money at the Greenwich branch of Music & Video Exchange, we found ourselves sitting in the Jubilee Place branch of Waterstone's where their small stock of books for children distracted Daughter#2 from the abject boredom of pottering around shops we had no intention of buying anything from.

Josh & Laura

Christmas is, in many ways, all about tradition. There are traditions the majority of us observe, and still others that we choose – at a family level, or on a personal level – to follow.

I wrote last year about one of mine, which is always reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in the run-up to Christmas; that book never fails to evoke warm, positively affirming feelings in me and stops me from developing a colder heart. This year we bought a heavily abridged children's' version for our two daughters - who knows, them reading A Christmas Carol might become a tradition for them too. Other traditions in our house may prove to be temporary until the girls grow up. One is watching the Sesame Street film Elmo's Christmas Countdown (with Ben Stiller as a hapless elf) with my daughters; I try not to think of a time when they will no longer be enthusiastic about these films, try not to think that I will find it difficult to indulge my love of all things Muppet when they've grown up and moved onto boy bands, boyfriends and the like.

A tradition I started last year is to write an annual Christmas short story. Last year's – Christmas, etc – will have passed you by, mainly because I didn't tell anyone, beyond a handful of followers on Twitter, about it. You can read it here.

This year's describes a night of optimism and promise shared between two students at an end of term Christmas party, set mostly on the streets of London that I love so much. You can read Josh & Laura here. I guess you could call it a Christmas love story.

Thanks to everyone who has either voluntarily chosen to follow (or who I have coerced into following) my sporadic thoughts and musings over the past year. Have an excellent Christmas and New Year, and expect more of the same in 2011.

Žižkov Television Tower

Talk of the festive season, Christmas markets and the sharp drop in temperatures always makes me think of Prague. In our relatively carefree, childless days, Mrs S and our friends Tina and Steve took a trip to Prague just before Christmas in 2003 and it was everything that I hoped it would be, and more; that city has subsequently become indivisible from my thoughts of the Christmas season.

I soaked up the festive atmosphere, the Gothic architecture and the quintessentially Eastern European modernist design of the subway platforms with unbridled enthusiasm. So what if we also had to spend a night in the airport when heavy snowfall – initially beautifully and silently draped across the city – later brought everything unexpectedly to a standstill, including all fights; so what if the tensions of queuing all night for replacement flights meant I got into a spat with a similarly-disgruntled Latvian in the early hours of the morning; so what if it was the holiday where I may or may not have drunkenly pissed in a dustbin in the hotel toilets (after taking the opportunity to gorge on the free drinks in the executive lounge all the details thereafter became a little sketchy, though I still maintain it was someone else).

The point is that whenever I think of Christmas, I think of the wintry chill and icy splendour of Prague. Whenever I visit an ersatz Christmas market in this country I think of the infinitely more authentic market we visited in Staré Město; whenever the biting cold in late December makes me crave hot chocolate, I think of the small café we four huddled in on the other side of the Charles Bridge (Karlův most) at the base of the steps leading up to the majestic Hradčany palace complex. I understand that Prague is beautiful in the summer, but that wouldn't be the Prague I would want to remember.

Much as I loved the impressive antediluvian squares, bridges, spires and buildings, my favourite structure in Prague lies some way out from the main tourist centre. Taking the subway out to Žižkov, a mostly residential area not frequented by mainstream tourist footfall and certainly not gentrified like other areas of the city; well at least it wasn't in 2003. The central reason for visiting this relatively unassuming urban area, apart from seeing rusty old Ladas and run-down apartment buildings is the Žižkov Television Tower.

The Žižkov Television Tower has a simplistic design that evokes classic Communist post-War attempts at some sort of futuristic modernity; all told, with its double layer of curved-edge rectangular pods in the top third of the main tower, and its trio of cylindrical legs (one containing the tiny lift that takes visitors to the top), it looks like something that Hanna-Barbera would have conceived for The Jetsons. Of course it looks dated now, like it no doubt did at the time of its construction between 1985 and 1992, and it certainly wasn't at all popular with Prague purists when it opened, given its imposing, high position above the city and the fact that they built the tower on an old Jewish cemetery. I like to think of it as being a bit like our dear old BT Tower, just a whole lot funkier.

The views from certain angles in the viewing galleries afford, in many senses, the best views of Prague. Tourists may well elect to view the city at close quarters from, say, the Malá Strana bridge tower or Old Town Hall in Staré Město, but for me the Žižkov Television Tower gives a greater context and long-range perspective on this city.

If you recall the Saturday evening British TV sci-fi series The Tripods, you'd be forgiven for getting a slightly fearful sensation at the sight of the external profile of the building, a feeling which is altogether heightened by David Černý's permanent Miminka art installation from 2001 – ascending upward on the legs of the tower are several statues of crawling babies. It's quirky and not altogether right, but once you transcend the oddness (and recollections of a certain withdrawal scene from Trainspotting) it's fun.

As I've said here before, tall buildings are divisive, much more so in a city where the only other tall buildings are sacred and centuries-old religious structures, but whichever way you look at it, the Žižkov Television Tower is delightfully contrarian and wonderfully strange; a perverse thing of otherworldly elegance in a city with abundant charm already.

A Snowy London Thursday

Source: MJA Smith

I've never liked snow. I hated it as a kid, though I'm sure I must occasionally have had some fun at some point. Chiefly I associate snow with having to wear wellington boots, which I detested; detested so much that during the bleak snow-filled winters we seemed to have every year in England in the early to mid-Eighties I'd occasionally find myself choosing to be one of the kids who didn't have wellies with them, thus being forced to spend breaktime and lunchtime in the classroom with the kids who had colds or ear infections, or who were being punished, rather than pelting my school friends with snowballs. That and the memory of the trek up the road to my school with my mother, past gutters from which foot-long stalactites of icicles would dangle; a sort of weird Narnia in the heart of the Midlands, past the old man's house with a different Meccano model in the window every day like some sort of out of place Lapland toymaker.

It's snowing in London today. I'm passing through Barbican Underground and there is something peaceful about the undisturbed snow on the disused platform; however everywhere else the snow is already becoming dirty as progressive commuters tramp their cold way to work. That I'm even on a Tube seems mildly amusing – checking the TFL website on the way to Euston, the Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines that I rely on to get me to the office are all suffering with severe delays, though I somehow managed to catch a half empty Met Line service no had than I stepped on to the platform at Euston Square.

I spoke to a native New Yorker this week who couldn't believe how poorly Britain copes with extremes of weather, and it is true. A colleague who lives near Horsham hasn't been able to get in to London the past two days as train services into London Bridge have all been cancelled. He and I were both supposed to be in Edinburgh from Tuesday to Thursday, but Edinburgh Airport has been closed most of the week. The New York guy said that in Manhattan life just goes on as it did before. The Lithuanian guy who works in our building's Starbucks concession also said that back home snow just doesn't bother them, their tyres having chains to prevent slippage. Here, it's complete chaos. News reports tell you how much a day of snow costs the economy, yet nothing changes. Roads go ungritted. Electricity supplies get cut. Intake of hot chocolate increases. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose as they say.

Somehow I managed to get to the office and home both days I've been into London this week, travelling from one of those serendipitously placed corridors north of London where business has carried on reasonably as usual. That said, I could have done with not looking like a complete tit wearing a beanie hat I picked up at some outward bound course somewhere in darkest Surrey a few years back.

Still, there's always the excitement etched on the faces of my two little girls to warm my cantankerous attitude towards the snow. We had the barest dusting of snow at the weekend – literally a millimetre at a stretch – and they were bouncing off the walls with joy, asking to make snowmen and have snowball fights, lying on the carpets and making snow angels. They don't mind wearing wellies either, so no chance of them being the grumpy kid choosing to sit with the naughty and sick kids in the classroom at lunchtime.

As I was trudging across the brown slushy mess that adorned the pavement, I began to wonder why I was even bothering going into the office, given that I only had a bunch of conference calls that I could very well have done from home; then I got to my floor in our office building and took a look outside, and when I saw the City spreading out in front of me covered in a delicate blanket of white snow, I realised that's why I bothered.