In the morning I went down to the financial district at the tip of Manhatten prior to meeting Jeremy for lunch. Last year I read Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail - an enthralling account of the banking crisis - and I enjoyed wandering beneath the towering corporate headquaters, built as hymns to enormous wealth and equally towering egos.
I met Jeremy at 200 West Street, the 43-story Goldman Sachs building. As we had a brief tour I realised that whilst the people I saw in front of their trading screens probably earned ten times that of the average American in this world they were the small fry, with embarrassingly meagre pay packets.
I also passed ground zero that morning. Thinking about the 9/11 attacks invariably makes me sad. I can't help reliving the awful footage of people falling like flakes of soot from the sky having chosen to jump. How unbearable to know as a certainty that you were about to die. How could you speak to someone you loved knowing that? What words could you possibly find? How could you ever choose who to contact out of all the people you were leaving behind?
Lunch with Jeremy was great though and who better to shake you out of a melancholy state of mind? But by the time we'd finished I was very late for Andy so I hurried to the Metropolitan Museum hoping that he'd got my texts with a new meeting time. After an anxious 15 minutes in the lobby I heard my name and was relieved to see a familiar smile twinkling at me from the balcony.
The Met's not a bad place to leave someone waiting: he'd already had time to see the photography from the 1910s exhibition and then together we checked out the Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern collections. I wish we could have seen more, but the museum was closing and we were herded with the other visitors like reluctant sheep towards the exits.
Home for some tea and to be beaten at cards by Andy.
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