It wasn't quite as scripted. I woke up in a city and found I was king of the bill all right a dirty great hospital bill.o Ah, New York ... but it wasn't quite what ol' Blue Eyes had in mind.

Marching along Broadway, taking a subway to downtown, kicking leaves on a late autumn afternoon in Central Park it could have been straight out of a Simon and Garfunkel song if I hadn't had a whopping great cumulo nimbus-sized piece of cotton wool strapped to the top of my left index finger as a result of my slicing it off with my razor.

The cost? Several hundred dollars.

The embarrassment? Unmentionable.

The lesson? Don't forget a protective cover for your razor especially when blindly fishing in your wash kit first thing in the morning.

Still, I was in New York the world's greatest living, breathing freak show who on earth was going to notice?

We were up early to make the most of our seven-day break in the Big Apple, and a quick shower and shave and we should have been off to the Empire State Building.

Except we were off to St Vincent's Hospital in Midtown.

Still the accident quite literally brought a splash of colour to the conveniently-situated Hotel Carter (250 West 43rd St, off Times Square), which can only be described as a cross between a Cantonese takeaway and Vietnamese brothel.

Budget, is probably the diplomatic term.

But the result of waving a half-chopped finger above and below one's head in a fit of excruciating pain so that the blood formed a perfect circle across the bed, up the wall, along the ceiling and back again, only complemented the torn sheets and velvet headboard, clonking radiator and broken TV.

Kind of Salvador Dali, I tried to explain to the manager. But he wasn't having any of it.

Anyway, after wrecking a hotel bedroom and spending the first day in A&E, we finally set out to explore this city of superlatives.

Other than the excellent subway service, the best way to see NYC is to walk and if you do it properly you'll have a crooked neck by the end.

Many of the eight million folk living there haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what the city has to offer, so trying to explain it here is fruitless.

There's the Empire State Building, obviously, and its unrivalled vistas across the city; a boat trip along the Hudson to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty; Grand Central Station, delightful Central Park, Chinatown, Greenwich Village, shopping and Fifth Avenue, Broadway and, it's almost obligatory now, a pilgrimage to Ground Zero.

We had all seen the event unfold live on our TV screens, but still thousands of tourists make their way to see where the Twin Towers once stood.

And, after all this time, an eerie silence still hangs over the vast wasteland which, when I was there, looked like a gum after two enormous wisdom teeth had been plucked out.

We managed to shoehorn in an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, but frankly my fix of culture wasn't going to come from a room full of statues and paintings, so I was rather chuffed to bag front row seats on The Late Show with David Letterman.

We also wanted to see a live stage show and, after my original request was turned down, eventually plumped for 42nd Street, which was out of this world and a real dollop of glitzy Broadway except we sat next to a couple from Woking.

And then the food. Oh, the food.

Suffice to say New Yorkers aren't exactly starved of choice, but if you go to NYC and want an authentic deli try Carnegie (55th St and Seventh Ave).

This world-renowned deli will make eyes water and belly wince.

Bizarrely, this Jewish eaterie is more famous for its cheesecakes than obscenely stacked sandwiches, but when in Rome...

I plumped for the 'Woody Allen' essentially a couple of slices of lightly toasted bread with layers of pastrami the size of Sicily inside, accompanied by a couple of infeasible large pickles (a house tradition, apparently).

Trust me, if you nip there at midday and you'll need to because the queue stretches for a couple of miles at 4pm you'll be fine until dinner.

We had timed our arrival well.

And as far as I'm concerned it's best visited during or before Christmas, and that's what we did.

One night we joined several million other people in the annual Christmas 'bun' fight, otherwise known as the long wait in the cold for the switch-on of the Christmas tree lights at the Rockefeller Center.

What with the state of our roads and railways, several times out of 10 it's probably quicker and more convenient to hop on a plane and travel to New York than it is to travel across Britain.

What with the price of fuel it's almost as cheap, too.

And frankly, there's no better place on Earth to spend a long weekend.

Friends and family were most disappointed when I produced cheap mementos of the Big Apple gift-wrapped in a Tiffany's bag that I'd managed to swipe earlier.

But if you're going to New York there's one thing you must never forget the protective cover for your razor.

Oh, and take out comprehensive travel insurance too.