Gather up the news again, I'm back from New York

I'm back, and even my bleary jetlagged eyes can see that I have apparently only blogged about what I wore in New York and the arguments I had with subway operators. There were more arguments with subway operators, incidentally, but it just got too repetitive to log them all. Sometime around the penultimate one I noticed a small sign on the booth reading "Courteous Service Here". Would have taken a photo but feared it was forbidden and I would be punished with some kind of ritual decapitation.

I did do things other than argue with subway operators and get dressed, but I did do those things every day. (Wardrobe watchers: I returned having failed to wear two dresses and a top, and really I could have done without at least one of the cardigans.) I did remarkably little shopping (although my suitcase burst at the seams on the way home, which tells a different story) and I only went to one museum (the Guggenheim, stunning building but mostly shut) and one gallery (the fantastic Sophie Calle show at Paula Cooper) and rain for three days curtailed some of my walking around with my eyes open, and yet somehow I feel like I crammed full every minute with diverse sources of joy.

Will it be singing showtunes by the piano at the excellently-named gay bar Marie's Crisis that I look back on with most fondness? Will it be the jazz gig in an old woman's Harlem flat? Or perhaps the Lincoln Center's screening of an obscure 1934 Soviet musical farce, described with much accuracy by them as "part Marx, part Marx Brothers"? Will it be going to the birthday party of a Tom Cruise impersonator who had his own showreel projected onto a screen throughout, and who took time out from the cocktails and cake to show the bar the trailer of his new movie? (Surely he was lost - that sort of behaviour belongs in LA.) Will it be arguing (and winning the argument) with a ferociously patronising New York waitress ("I don't know how it works where *you* come from, but here if you put your knife and fork together it means you've finished")? Or will it be the simple joys of Coney Island on a Monday morning in torrential rain, where the only people around are moribund Russian waiters waiting for something - anything - to happen? Getting drunk on Mint Juleps and watching my horse lose the Kentucky Derby with a group of the preppiest men in history? Eating eggs over easy in an old Greek dive, served by a seventy-year-old waitress with drawn-on eyebrows? The vanful of cats? The Burger Parade (not a place, but a menu item)? The Bourgeois Pig (swine flu not included)? Shoegasm? Barney Greengrass, the Sturgeon King? Or just the discovery of the best bar on earth? (You think I'd tell? On a public website?)