Stu had an apartment on Broadway Terrace, which was (and still is) kind of off-Broadway.

(At this point, with the mention of Broadway, 70s fans with long memories may be waiting for the narrative to lurch into Damon Runyon pastiche. I’m thinking about it. I’m thinking about it.)

19 Broadway Terrace, #1D, is way up in the north of Manhattan. Wall St is in the southern tip, so head north from there, past Chinatown and through Greenwich Village, you eventually get to the Empire State Building on 35th St. You are still nowhere near Broadway Terrace. Keep going, right up to Central Park which runs from 59th St up to 110th St. Are we nearly there yet? Yes, dear, if you think another 80 streets is nearly there. Broadway Terrace is so far up Manhattan that the grid pattern of avenues and streets for which the island is famous has got drunk and veered sideways.

Frank and Sue had an apartment down the stairs (or up – my notes are unclear on this. Well, to be totally frank, non-existent. My memory recalls “same building”, but that’s it) and there seemed to be other fans around quite close (memory and notebook failure – who was the guy who worked as a short-order cook?). Stu’s apartment was fine, but seemed to be a place for sleeping, not living, in. His kitchen had no food in it. The fridge was a source of light (when you opened the door) not sustenance. Cobwebs covered the cupboards. Bats hung from the ceiling. The rain forest was beginning to encroach. Stu always ate out – breakfast, lunch, dinner. This too was novelty: buying breakfast on the way to work, or in my case next morning, on my way to see the sights of Manhattan with Sue Rae. Eating out could be cheap.

This was when I began spending actual dollars, and where I discovered that every one-dollar note, or bill, was at best dishevelled and more generally creased and grubby.

We started off in the Garment District, where Stu worked doing things I do not care to recall to ladies garments I prefer not to mention. Oh, all right then. Stu worked for Christian Dior Intimate Apparel on Madison Avenue; I still have a company promotional pencil he gave me with the name and address on it. His job was to take a design for an item of intimate apparel, created at a specific size, and scale it up and down to different sizes – which is not just a case of making every dimension bigger or smaller, as you will appreciate when you think about it.

Next, we went to the Empire State Building, from the top of which you can see for miles inland and out to sea, and from the top of which that day I could see the top of the Chrysler Building and a lot of fog. The Chrysler Building impressed me and I still think it is the prettiest skyscraper ever built. Then the Rockefeller Center (note accurate spelling of place name!), the New York Daily News Building, St Patrick’s Cathedral, the UN Plaza and UN Building, and Central Park. The road by the UN building had the best traffic sign I have ever seen: “Don’t even think of parking here.”

My notes also say “etc”. Walking through New York to all those buildings means you see a lot of etc. Most of the etc went vertiginously upwards, giving rise to streets modelled on the Grand Canyon where you could only see the sun overhead at noon.

It was the same in Houston’s Downtown. The rest of Houston, though, is very different. As you drive in from the airport, you can see the city spread out – and does it spread out – in front of you, only two storeys high, at most. And then you catch sight of the citadel rising 50 or 60 storeys looking solid and impenetrable – that’s Downtown.

That evening we had dinner out (of course) but not without much telephoning around to discuss and decide place and time amongst the New York fans, and this in the days long before mobiles (cell phones), you remember.

I was beginning to notice a few things about New York. For one thing, the fire escape stairs and ladders all came down the front of the buildings. I don’t mean the Chrysler Building or the Rockefeller Center (spelling!), but the apartment blocks, where people live. You see these things on the American TV cop shows and someone is always escaping down the fire escape into a back alley. It looks like a back alley on the TV, but don’t let that fool you: it’s the main street. Probably there is no back of the building into which a fire escape could go, but it gives a curious look to someone used to tidy front doors with all the utility type things out of sight.

The pavements (spelled: s i d e w a l k s) were concrete with steel edge strips. This was so the steel (rusting, of course, but not rotted) could continue to mark the edge and height of the sidewalk long after the concrete had crumbled away inside it. Sticking up on its own, it gave you something to trip over.

I decided New York would be a great place when they finished it. (I thought this quite clever, and was much disgruntled some time later, back in England, to hear Keith Oborn say exactly the same clever thing about Manchester, probably because I was living there.)

I went, on business, to Nairobi (capital of Kenya, for the geographically challenged. In Africa.) some six months after the TAFF trip and spent three weeks there. This was very different from New York or Chicago or any other western city. At first it didn’t seem so. My colleague and I were staying at the Hotel Intercontinental, which as its name suggests was part of an international chain of hotels that look much the same anywhere in the world. Each day we walked to the office down Parliament Road which had the parliament building on one side and the cathedral on the other – both very modern, although the parliament building was designed to look a bit like Westminster – and turned left onto Harambee Avenue where our office was opposite the Office of the President. Apart from the bougainvillea trees on the avenue, it could have been a European city.

We had a nice view of half a dozen bougainvillea trees right outside our office and one day three or four workmen arrived with pangas (Kenyan machetes) and a truck. They began pruning the bougainvillea. Quite drastically, I thought; all the small branches went. Then they started on the big branches and finally on the trunks, and we were left with half a dozen tree stumps. We asked what was going on. “It’s for the President. The trees could hide snipers.”

Indeed, a few days later we were watching as His Excellency President Daniel Arap Moi’s motor cavalcade left the grounds. The police had stopped all the traffic and the cars roared out onto the road at about fifty miles an hour, taking no chances on anyone being able to get a shot in.

Sorry, I was making a different point here. This part of Nairobi was modern, a symbol of a growing country that had gained independence barely twenty years earlier. Or if you take a wider perspective, regained independence. A little further out was an older area, built in colonial times with the Norfolk hotel and the mosque. Beyond that you came to residential streets, the houses getting smaller the further from the centre. I remember driving to a depot on the outskirts of the city looking at some breeze block houses with not a hint of decoration, and thinking: ‘Those are small,’ and then realising that each “house” had three front doors. Beyond that you came to the poor areas, the shanty towns with houses made from any material going spare, and corrugated tin shacks lining the road; some were selling food, some were bars, dark inside not through choice but because there was no lighting, not even windows. It hit me quite hard, and I wondered to myself how I could write a TAFF trip report about the richest country in the world when mere months later I had seen such sights in Nairobi.

Probably this was a melodramatic response, a conceit, which just gave me a somewhat feeble excuse not to write the trip report immediately.

Diana reminds me of another housing culture clash. We had a four bedroom house in Woking, on a new estate. Next door but one was a three bedroom house, which was rented out to the Hollioake family. We got to know Daria Hollioake and her daughter Ebony, who played with Eleanor, but almost never saw Mr Hollioake, an oil company executive who did much travelling, or the two sons, Adam and Ben, who were at boarding school. If the names Adam and Ben Hollioake ring a bell it’s because they both played cricket for England in the 1990s. But I digress (of course I do).

The family had come to England from Australia and Mr Hollioake was not much impressed with English houses, as being very small for the money. Across the square was a much larger house with rooftops at different heights. ‘That would be more like it,’ said Mr H. It was gently pointed out to him that the “house” in question not only had three front doors visible, it had another three round the other side, and was in fact six maisonettes.