In the afternoon I met up with another friend, Kate, who is a New Yorker born and bred and who knows her city better than most. She has already written an excellent book about how the city works on a daily basis and now she is about to publish another about New York’s skyscrapers. Kate got a bunch of her friends in to pier 52 to watch Macy’s July 4 firework display on the Hudson. Celebratory events don’t get more American than this. It was brilliant fun and completely over the top; tugboats playing water hoses in the colours of the American flag, flypasts by F16 jets and NYPD helicopters, and then seven barges sending an extraordinary pyrotechnical display up into a still shimmering night sky for a long, long time, whilst behind us the great city towered proudly. Great stuff!