I am often asked having lived in nine cities on four continents in my adult life, “where is the best place that you have lived?”

My retort is comparisons are fruitless.

Indeed, I tell them “everywhere is as good as people that you meet at that time”. The work colleagues, friends, friends of friends, business acquaintances, fellow club members, visitors, school parents, the newsagent, gallerist or doorman, who gives a wave and so on.

In the late nineties while living in a loft conversion on 86th and Amsterdam in New York, one such figure was Andrew Gould. He resembled a seventies CBGB’s rocker with a receding hairline but a razor sharp Brooklyn wit. The ability to make a bitchy comment laced with a heartwarming smile. Andrew would stick his head out of the door on my walk home from his Upper West Side hair salon, New York Hair, and shout “Look at the Brit swagger!” The heads of his predominatly Jewish clientele, would swivel and he smile at them, “he loves it”. Andrew, friend of Ronnie Wood and assorted artists, and married to an adorable wife, Molly, just made life living in New York, fun every time you passed his place. I’d go back to his salon long after leaving New York just for the acid wit. Cruelly, the party ended tragically early for him in the early 2000s, as cancer claimed him. “Life’s a bitch, don’t you know it…” he would opine. No, you my friend made living in New York for a newly installed Brit expat, a one-of-a-kind experience.