So there I was, a man turned fifty years of age who'd never been to New York. Okay, I'd been to America, but never to the Big Apple, which, I have to admit, felt very much like a yawning void in my experience of life. Somewhere in the back of my mind I felt like someone two thousand years ago who'd never been to Rome. All around me were the artefacts and cultural icons of an empire whose capital was unknown to me. It was time to put that right.
If you're going to do a trip of a lifetime you might as well do it right, and travelling at the front of the plane is a good place to start. Apart from the comfort and the Champagne, you get a courtesy limo to and from the airport, which is precisely how the trip began - a shiny black limo arriving at my house to take me to the airport where fast track checking-in and security awaits along with an executive lounge. No doubt about it, travelling premier class takes a big chunk out of travel hassle.

After a soporific and Champagne filled flight to JFK airport in New York, a big, black Lincoln Towncar was waiting to take me to the Four Seasons Hotel, just off Central Park in midtown Manhattan. Oddly I'd seen the foyer of this hotel in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous the previous night, but it's still an impressive atrium, high-ceilinged and marbled in a vaguely art-deco style, designed by I M Pei. I checked in at the desk and the very polite young man said 'Oh, Mr. Tullio, seeing as you're staying a week I'll upgrade you to a luxury room. Have a nice stay.'

I took the lift to my room and took in the view. Last time I looked out of a window this high up I was in a plane. Even on the 23rd floor the view downwards is vertiginous. I looked out at what I later discovered was the General Motors building - now a part of the Trump empire - and by pressing my nose to the glass I could see the southern tip of Central Park. I picked up the phone and ascertained that Paul McGuinness was in residence - for it was him I'd come to see. The view from his room on the 38th floor was pretty overwhelming, I could see right beyond the park to Harlem and across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Wow.

Paul was in New York for a variety of reasons, but on this my first night, his new protégé, Paddy Casey, was fronting for the Pretenders at the Roseland. Chrissey Hinde had got herself arrested the previous day for cutting up leather jackets in The Gap, and the show had nearly been cancelled. 'I used to manage her once,' said Paul, like a man reprieved. We left the hotel with a half hour or so to spare to get to the Roseland Ballroom and discovered that taxis are hard to find at theatre hour. 'Right,' said Paul, 'limo it is.' Stretch limos are a big piece of New York's street scene and they line up in droves outside the Four Seasons. Mostly black, but some white, they're nearly always Lincoln Towncars which are cut in half and then a bit's welded into the middle. The one we took was your typical stretch - TV in one cabinet with bad reception, water in the drinks cabinet on the other side, since New York state doesn't permit alcohol in cars. 'You should look through the moon roof,' said Paul and opened what we refer to as a sun roof. 'Stand up and look out. It's the best way to see the buildings.' He was right, but I felt very uncool travelling with a big idiot I'm-new-in-town grin all over my face.

The Roseland's a nice venue and while Paul did his stuff with his client I went to a bar and discovered a New York beer called Bronx. The barman did some good conjuring tricks too, so we traded two. After the show, where Paddy Casey took the audience by the scruff of the neck and made them listen to him, we decided to go to Sparks, one of the older New York steak houses. Peter Luger's was mooted, but it's in Brooklyn, while we wanted to stay on Manhattan island. Sparks is famous not just for its steaks, but because the mobster Paul Castellano was shot as he was leaving it. Just opposite the Roseland there's another steak house called Gallaghers, which takes its steaks seriously enough to devote a large window display to them. No butcher's shop that I've ever seen has this many steaks on display. But we walked on by, Sparks was our goal and here's the thing: it may have been injected with growth hormones, it might have been genetically modified, it probably broke any number of EU directives, but this was the best steak I've ever eaten. That simple.

By the time we were back in the hotel sipping one last glass of Champagne I worked out I'd been awake for 26 hours, I felt tired, and it was time for bed.

Saturday.

I lay back on four pillows turned on the TV and switched the curtains open. Yup. There's a bank of switches by the bed that operates the curtains. Nice toy; open, close, open a bit, close, open again and survey the rain. Rain? That wasn't part of the plan. Today the plan was the Circle Line, the boat that goes forty-five miles anti-clockwise all around the island of Manhattan, over a few tunnels, under 19 bridges and through one. We were to be joined by two Irish friends, Isobel Smith and Rachel Sexton who were in New York for the weekend. Isobel phoned. 'Surely we're not going in this weather? Rachel saw sleet.' Would that put off a Wicklow man? An hour later we'd met up in the lobby and were off to Pier 42 to get the boat despite the weather. Mad dogs and Englishmen in the midday sun, Irish and Chinese on the Circle Line with plenty of seats to choose from. As we circled the southern tip of Manhattan where the twin towers of the World Trade Centre stand, low cloud enveloped all but the bottom twenty stories or so. I must be the only tourist to have photos of Manhattan's skyline minus the tops of the buildings. It's an extraordinarily informative tour, our guide kept up a commentary with the occasional break most of the way. I learnt that 'Manhattan' meant 'hilly island' in Algonquin; that penthouse duplexes cost up to $20 million; that buildings over six stories have to have their own water tower. We passed by Ellis Island and saw what millions of immigrants saw, we circled the Statue of Liberty before turning north and heading up the East River toward Harlem and the North of the Island. It was up here on the very northern tip that we went through a bridge; an Amtrack bridge that swings open to let us through and then closes again for the next train. Before we left the boat I had my first New York hot-dog.

Back at the pier we pick up our tourist photos and head off to Greenwich Village where we've arranged to meet Ken Friedman. Ken's from L.A. originally, but he's been in New York for years, he's in the music business, he knows everyone and he's very cool. We're sitting in the Corner Bistro on Jane Street which Ken tells us serves the finest burgers in New York. But don't take Ken's word for it; there's a piece from the New York Times in the window saying the same thing. It's a quirky, small and cramped space that's also a bar, which means you can smoke. As the week went by - and this was my last week of smoking before giving up for good - I realised how much restaurant behaviour is governed by smoking. The basic rule is that you can smoke at the bar but not in the dining room. In some places where the two things are really just one room that's a bit like having an area of a swimming pool that you can pee in, but that's the law and it gets enforced by and large. In the Corner Bistro the whole place is a bar, so you can smoke, which everyone seemed to be doing with gusto.

Ken took us on a tour of the Village, down Cornelia Street which is stuffed with good restaurants like Le Gigot, Pearl, the Cornelia Street Cafe and Po. Stand at the junction of Bleecker Street which runs right through the village, and it's a gourmet's delight: cheese shops, Faicco's Pork Shop, bakeries, groceries, delis and Ottomanelli's Wild Game Shop. There's no food that couldn't be found here. Oh, and Myers of Keswick has to be seen to be believed. It's a tiny shop with a window stuffed with everything quintessentially English. Weetabix, Coleman's Mustard, Marmite, Bovril, Fairy Liquid, Omo and Carr's water biscuits are just a few of the oddments in the window. If only they could have packaged the Queen Mother.

All that walking had made the appetite grow, so following Ken like hungry dogs we made a variety of stops, first to the Alleged Galleries on Washington Street that was showing the works of Chris Johanson, an artist who brought out in me the 'my five-year-old kid can do better than that' school of criticism, then to Waterloo Brasserie on Charles Street, a Belgian restaurant owned by friends of his where we stopped for just the one, and finally on to Pastis on Ninth Avenue, which is hip and currently very hot. The inside looks like it's been there forever, but it's pretty new. The white tiles on the pillars came from a Parisian Metro and the furniture gives the impression of a fin-de-siecle brasserie. Enamelled advertisements for Ricard and Gauloises complete the effect. Some of Ken's friends were here to meet us and I found myself sitting beside Jay Weissman, a property developer who is married to Kathleen Turner. The word 'crowded' doesn't even begin to convey how full this place was. 'A cross between a restaurant and Grand Central Station,' said Jay. Certainly the area around the bar where the smokers hung out was insanely packed with people. The food was pretty good, and by New York's standards pretty reasonable. A good one to try - if you can get in.

One last move took us to Fressen on West 13th Street, another hip and hot restaurant where we had another glass or two of wine at the bar, along with a cigarette or two. I'm trying to enjoy every one I smoke at the moment. In a week I'll be off them forever. We walk for a bit after Fressen and Ken wants to go to Hogs and Heifers, a bar whose speciality is a wall hung with brassieres. The deal here is to dance on the bar counter and hook your bra onto the wall along with others. Only if you're a girl, of course. There's a queue a mile long waiting to get in and it's raining so we give it a miss and I go to bed.

Sunday.

I awake and switch open the curtains and can see the tops of the buildings. The weather has improved overnight and the sun is making little sorties between the clouds. Practically anything you order for breakfast in the Four Seasons will cost you fifty dollars or more, so the morning habit became a large capuccino in Oren's, a little coffee bar opposite the back entrance of the hotel where you get change from four dollars. Obviously you can't have the coffee and a cigarette, but you can sit just outside and smoke one there. Less than a week to go before I'm an ex-smoker.

We were off to meet Ken in SoHo, which is an area South of Houston, hence the name. There's a NoHo as well and a Tribeca, which is the TRIangle BElow the CAnal. But I digress; we waited for him in Bar Pitti which is slap next door to da Silvano's, one of the old established Italian restaurants. Across the road was an apartment building named in large letters '10 Downing Street' and a bit further on was a cinema advertising a 'film fleadh', pronounced here universally as 'fleed'. Tonight's film, the last of the Irish festival, was 'A Love Divided' and Liam Cunningham and Orlaigh Brady had come over for it. We'd been invited along, but there was something else that had to be done, something much more New York, which took precedence.

Ken arrived and we had a light lunch in Bar Pitti, with just a little wine. Francesco Clemente the portraitist was eating there and Mick Jones out of Foreigner arrived just as we were leaving, so we were clearly in a very cool place. After lunch Ken decided that as an Italian I had to see Little Italy so off we went in search of cannoli, not before taking in a Matisse exhibition at the Franklin Bowles Gallery which was also showing some Picasso prints. I knew we were getting close when we passed the Church of the Most Precious Blood, dedicated to the Patron Saint of Naples, San Gennaro. Next stop was La Bella Ferrara, a pasticceria where we got our cannoli, little tubes of pastry stuffed with creme patisserie. Little Italy and Chinatown sort of blend together, turn one way and you're in Italy, turn the other and you're in China with its fish markets full of live fish and buckets of squirting clams.

From here a walk through SoHo and Ken points out the cast iron buildings. These were bought mail-order from Pittsburgh foundries and erected on site like a pre-fab. Some of the less well-maintained ones were going rusty, which is probably a better way to age than wet or dry rot. A walk through the Grand Street flea market nearly had me buying a whole load of stuff, but then I remembered I only had a suitcase.

Ken now did something truly noble. He gave us his Knicks tickets for the big game. The New York Knickerbockers were playing the San Antonio Spurs in Madison Square Gardens, and Ken has season tickets, right up close and personal, and it was these that he gave us. He also drew us a celebrity map of the arena from the point of view of our seats. Woody Allen and Dustin Hoffman to our left, Spike Lee to our right. 'I'll watch it at home on TV,' he said, 'they're not likely to win tonight anyway.' Last time I saw a basketball game was thirty years ago in Dublin and it was the Harlem Globetrotters, but this was for real - for the NBA championship. Great seats let us see all the action, instant replays on huge screens above our heads, endless supplies of beer and hot dogs, and endless time-outs - not just for the players, but for the TV commercial breaks as well. These gaps were filled by the Knicks City Dancers, pretty dancing girls who moved like Pan's People on speed. Well shoot, by the end of the game the Knicks had won it, 93 to 82. Having been brought up in England with that old idea of sportsmanship and fair play I couldn't help notice how that doesn't obtain here at all. Whenever the Spurs scored there was a deafening silence and loud cheers if they missed the basket. But the real killer was when in the second half the Spurs were playing towards us and everyone who, like us, was sitting behind the basket was issued with a large card with the word 'BRICK' on it. Whenever the Spurs were attempting a penalty basket a wall of these went up accompanied by shouts of 'You'll never make it' and whatever else might be conducive to putting them off their stroke. Gamesmanship to beat the band.

Monday.

A bright and sunny morning had me trotting off to Central Park, via F A O Schwartz, the toy shop. It wasn't warm, but the sun was shining and all was right with the world. I watched the jarveys being pulled slowly and with dignity by the horses, I watched the squirrels scuttling up and down the trees, I watched the male pigeons making up to supremely uninterested females, I watched the ice-skaters circle the rink beside the pond. I sat and smoked a cigarette. Four days left, then I quit. In front of me on Central Park South I could see the Plaza Hotel, a grande dame of a building, which would figure in my day more than I realised at the time. Because you can stand back from the buildings, Central Park is about the only place that you can look at the Manhattan skyline from without straining your neck.

All this provided the appetite needed for lunch, which was in Otabe on East 56th Street between Park and Madison. This is classy Japanese chic and seriously good food. We had a sort of booth and sat around three sides of a table, the centre of which was a hot-plate, and the fourth side was where the chef stood. An air extractor above our heads may have been the reason that we were allowed to smoke here. A big dish of Sushi, including sea urchin which I'm not crazy about, and smoked eel which was divine, nearly left us unable for the main course of garlic beef and chicken teriyaki. Great theatre of gastronomy this, having the chef cook before your eyes.

After lunch Isobel, who was about to leave, wanted one last drink in the Oak Bar, the bar alongside the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel. The hotel has the feel of Dublin's Shelbourne - although it's many times larger - and the Oak Bar just has to be New York's answer to the Horseshoe. We had a couple of drinks before it was time for Isobel to go to the airport. As we were leaving we all did a double take. 'Wasn't that Mo Mowlam?'

After a little light shopping Rachel and I went back to the Four Seasons to meet Paul who was there with Bill Whelan and his wife Denise. Bill was receiving an award from Hilary Clinton at an Irish American Gala night in the Plaza to honour his achievement with Riverdance. A little before eight we walked over to the Plaza. 'Security will probably be a bit tight,' said Paul, 'what with Hilary being there.' Even though neither Rachel nor I were on the guest list, we walked straight in and took our places to watch the awards. One for Mo Mowlam from Hilary, one for Bill Whelan. Our own Mary Harney spoke as well, and if she, Hilary and Mo had their way we'd have peace up North. It was all rounded off with a speech by Gabriel Byrne.

When it was time to go home later that night, even Sinn Feinners like Gerry Kelly took his Waterford Crystal lucky bag along with the rest of us on the way out. Not what you'd expect a socialist Marxist to do, really.

Tuesday.

Awoke and switched open the curtains. Dull today. Examine my goody bag from last night. The bag says Waterford Crystal, but there's none inside. There's a little pot of shamrock, though, and a few assorted trinkets - mostly with shamrocks on them.

Today is culture day. Rachel is taking me to the Frick Collection and then to the Guggenheim. She arrives bang on time and I'm not ready. A quick coffee and we're off. I fall in love with the Frick, as does everyone else who goes there. It's housed in the residence of Henry Clay Frick, one of the great robber barons of the turn of the last century, and it's his personal collection of art that fills this beautiful house on the eastern side of Central Park. It's not like a museum or an art gallery, it's more like visiting someone's house that's filled with wonderful old masters, mostly portraits and landscapes. I left it feeling positively uplifted. After the Frick we went to the Guggenheim, still on the east side of the Park, but further North. This is an amazing building, a huge spiral walkway circling up a round building to a glass-domed top, reminiscent of the BMW museum in Munich. There's an exhibition of work by Nam June Paik, a Korean-born artist whose work is composed of video and television installations. Off the spiral at different levels were rooms dedicated to other exhibitions of paintings and photography, none of which left me as exhilarated as the Frick, and some of it left me profoundly irritated.

Back downtown to do a little shopping. Madison Avenue has some pretty amazing shops and a lot of them, but the prices are scary. Lexington Avenue is parallel and cheaper, but with an Irish punt at near parity with the dollar, America is not the cheap shopping land it once was. The window shopping brought on an appetite so we went towards the village and ate a late lunch in the Cub Room Cafe on Prince Street. It has a posh restaurant as well as a cafe that serves pancakes, burgers and pasta, which is where we ate. It also has a big, open, bright bar area with sofas and low tables where you can drink and enjoy a cigarette in comfort. Only three more days smoking.

I say goodbye to Rachel and go back to the hotel. Kathy, Paul's wife, is arriving with her friend Aileen Blackwell and we're going to dinner in Bice, an Italian restaurant on East 54th Street. It's a chain and you can find a Bice in major cities all around the world. Good food and real Italian waiters, plus a big, well-lit room that looks smart. It's a haunt of the fashionable, and Rod Stewart came in and sat at a table near us, just to prove the point. I remembered a John Boorman story of a time he was flying on Concorde and waiting to get into the loo. A very attractive black lady was in front of him. She turned and over the roar of the engines said 'Let's do it on the plane.' John was so taken aback he was momentarily speechless. She nodded at him again and repeated it; 'Rod Stewart's on the plane.'

We walked back to the hotel and after one last drink in the bar it was time for bed. Two random thoughts before sleep overcame me. How can a city with the technology to erect some of the world's tallest buildings have no system for filling the pot-holes in the roads? And if design is fitting form to function, the New York taxi fails on all counts. How can a car this long have no room for the passengers? I'm not a big man, but even my knees hit up against the divide.

Wednesday.

Pottered around for much of the morning staring at buildings, then explored Borders, a huge bookshop that has some nice touches, like places to sit and read, chess and backgammon tables and coffee as well. I was happy to see a couple of copies of my book on the shelves, although perhaps I should have been happier to find none and a 'sold out' sticker instead. I'd arranged to meet Kathy and Aileen at a restaurant called Atlas on Central Park South, a very chic place that nonetheless offers a set lunch for $20, which seems terrific value given the room, the linen and the excellent service. Two other friends were there to meet us, Serena Bass who runs the bar at The Chelsea Hotel, and Jack Staub who's a playwright. I had a buffalo burger, since I thought it was time to try the all American bison. Probably a mistake, I allowed myself to be persuaded to try it with Emmenthal cheese, which meant I could taste cheese, but not the buffalo.

After lunch Kathy and Aileen wanted to see the Guggenheim, so I took the opportunity to see the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is built within the boundaries of Central Park. It's a huge place, and a couple of hours is too little to take in more than a tiny section, so I settled on the Egyptian art, since I wanted to see the Temple of Dedrus which has been brought stone by stone from Egypt and re-erected in a specially designed extension. Somehow I ended up looking at an exhibition of Romano-Egyptian art, which was composed of portraits taken from mummies. They were painted in encaustic, which is pigment and hot wax, and the life-sized portraits were on thin wood. The show was great, but not what I'd intended to see.

A long hot bath to soothe the aching feet was my preparation for the night's entertainment, which was Contact, a dance musical and described just about everywhere as 'New York's hottest ticket.' It was in the Vivian Beaumont theatre, which is part of the Lincoln centre, and it's been tipped for a Tony. I quite liked it, especially the second half, but I couldn't help feeling that if this was the front runner, the others in the race couldn't be up to much.

After the show we'd arranged to meet Eamon Dunphy in a restaurant on Madison Avenue called La Goulue, where we found him already ensconced when we arrived. It's a big place and the front third is designated a bar so we were able to smoke. Curiously, in this restaurant, the smoking section was packed, while the non-smoking rear two thirds was virtually empty. With two days to go I was enjoying my cigarettes.

We went back to the hotel bar for just the one, and before we went to bed Eamon asked me if I'd be writing about New York. 'Probably, yes,' I answered. 'Well don't forget to mention me and The Last Word if you do.'

Thursday

A long lie-in and a big capuccino starts the day, then off shopping with Aileen. The shop we want is Hammeker Schlemmer, a gizmo shop where all the latest high-tech toys can be found. Pride of display went to the seven-seater bicycle. It was built in the round with only one person doing the steering, the other six saddles arranged in a circle, so two cyclists would have had their backs to the direction of travel. Very odd. I could easily have bought most of this shop, but in the end I didn't.

Lunch today was in Remi, an Italian restaurant on West 53rd Street, so we met Kathy at the hotel and walked there. It was only four blocks, but by this stage my feet had begun to suffer from all the walking, so it felt like fifty. Remi is very chic and designer-styled, bright and spacious with tables packed rather closely together. We were shown to our table for three, right next to a solitary man reading a book. He looked up and it was Dunphy, reading a review copy of a book that Kathy is publishing. Coincidence? You be the judge. Eamon was just finishing a plate of pollo arrosto and it looked good, so I had that. Across the room from us sat Ed Koch, a previous mayor of New York, so I took that as some sort of imprimatur.

Tonight is the Big Night, it's the opening of Riverdance on Broadway and like all first nights in New York it starts early so that reviews can be filed. So back to the hotel from the restaurant to get ready. There's a big after-show party in Cipriani's and it's black tie, so we're all dressed to kill.

There's no doubt that arriving for a glitzy first night in a stretch limo to a battery of cameras and TV crews has a touch of glamour, and the foyer was awash with Irish. There were so many journalists that I did wonder if any newspapers were going to published in Ireland in the next couple of days. It was a polished show, much more international in flavour than previous incarnations and it got a tumultuous standing ovation.

Cipriani is a big catering firm and one of their outlets is the old Bowery Savings Bank on East 42nd Street, which is used only for functions. It's a huge, high-ceilinged building that looks like the interior of a classical temple. Perhaps the Bowery Savings Bank wanted to create a temple to Mammon. A band played, drinks flowed uninterruptedly for hours and a huge buffet ensured everyone was well fed. I was sitting beside Siobhan Cleary and her husband, Joe Dowling, who have moved to the states. Rupert Murray, who lit the show and Robert Ballagh who designed it were there too with their wives. Robert had had the same reaction to the Guggenheim show as I did, so I felt less of an entrenched and unreconstructed philistine.

By one o'clock most of the New Yorkers were gone, but the Irish were here to party, and party on we did. Cipriani's got us out of the door around 3.30, so we went back to my room in the Four Seasons and emptied the mini bar, then we emptied Paul and Kathy's. Last thing I remember is Dunphy singing sometime around six while the early morning light filtered through the curtains. When he left he reminded me; 'Don't forget to mention the Last Word.'

Friday - St. Patrick's Day.

Sometime around midday I awake to a blizzard. A howling wind is blowing snow in gusts between the buildings. I forced myself to go out and see the parade, since it passes down 5th Avenue, very near the hotel. It was bitterly cold and I didn't last too long, especially feeling as fragile as I did.

A snacklet and a cold mineral water back in the hotel bar helped me to feel a little better. Around 4 o'clock it was goodbye to Aileen and goodbye to the hotel as another stretch whisked us off to JFK airport. In the smoker's lounge I smoked my last three cigarettes before we boarded for the flight home.

Saturday

Arriving at six in the morning Dublin time is a little weird, but a good long sleep after being chauffeured home left me able to face the drive back into Dublin for another big night; Paul and U2 getting the freedom of the city along with Aung San Su Kyi. It was quite a momentous occasion and a signal honour for my friend, who made a gracious and terse speech of acceptance. It was followed by another great party, so we hit the ground in Ireland still running.

There may be little to be said in favour of arriving at the mid-century, but a week like this leaves enough memories to keep you going for years, even without cigarettes.