Where to start?

Here I am in New York, in an apartment on the Upper East Site that reminds us of nothing more than our own saggy, down-at-heel house back in Lewisham, only with more traffic noise echoing down from 2nd Avenue and taller neighbouring buildings.

It's our second full day in New York - a rest day after yesterday's fol-de-rol. Brunch with the Click authors was wonderful - there we are in the photo, full of brunch. (Click on it to be dazzled by my teeth. Tim Wynne-Jones is there, too, hiding behind Linda Sue's head.) And then the event itself, at Borders, went really well. There were paparazzi, even, because of Colin Farrell, and that was an experience in itself - my retinas have never been peppered with the after-images of so many flashes going off. The photographers were piled up at the back of a large crowd of more normal people, not all of whom were there to ogle Colin, and he gave very gracious speech for Amnesty and then handed over to Arthur Levine, who introduced us one by one, when we talked a tiny bit about what we'd done and read a couple of pages from our chapters of Click. Then he asked us a few curly questions, and allowed the audience to ask us one or two, and then we signed, signed, signed - it was amazing and delightful how many copies of the book we signed.

(Here is a really-quite-gross account of the event, which, the authors might as well not have attended, from the socialite's point of view. Gawd. At least you can see the book in a couple of shots, eh.)

Then Steven and I Walked in New York; we'd been through the bottom half of Central Park on the way to the event, and we continued on down Broadway until Broadway got too crowded - and it was hot! - and down 7th Avenue. We finished in Washington Square, which was all squirrels and musicians, and rested our sore feet for a while, then went on to Lupa, a Roman restaurant, where we had a fan-bloody-tastic dinner and way too much wine and laughter with Linda Sue and Tim. On to drinks with some children's literature professionals and then we rolled home across the Park, in the near-dark, and weren't attacked once - not even by squirrels, and we knew there were a lot of them around.

Today we breakfasted and went up to the Guggenheim, which was spectacularly invisible inside hessian and scaffolding, and had a queue of dozens outside, who were only being let in in dribs and drabs. We jumped the queue by going straight into the shop, then took a few photos up the middle just to show we'd been there, but we didn't look at any pictures, just scooted out again and across to the Reservoir in Central Park, and walked back down to the barber and the coffee shop before coming here and flaking for a couple of hours. Oh, too much wine last night...

And now we're going to try out the subway and head out to dinner again. It's even more summery here than at home, except for a few trees beginning to change colour. And New York is full of wonders.