CITIES WERE A MISTAKE:

Unlike a lot of parents with young kids in the city, I never longed to move to the suburbs during those weeks of being cooped up in lockdown. At the time I put it down, absurdly, to a combination of loyalty to the city, lack of opportunity to leave and, as I saw it, my own superior tolerance for discomfort. Now that the place is jumping again, I realise that a much larger part of the experience had to do with the changed dynamics of the city. If lockdown brought on feelings of claustrophobia, these were offset by the bizarre - and there's no denying it, thrilling - experience of living in an emptied-out city. New York shorn of visitors was a different, and in some ways easier, place to live, where, even at rush hour, you could time your movements around the city in increments of 10 minutes rather than hours. Those numbers crept up but, over an endless summer of few tourists and modest plans, the spell remained largely unbroken.

For businesses, Broadway, city finances and the rest, this September boom is welcome and necessary. At street level, however, struggling for room on the pavement or an inch of space on the subway, it's hard to avoid asking why we live like this. The airlessness of lockdown, when no one could get away from their families, has been replaced with a sense of proximity to the city's 8.5 million people, all of us trying to get to the same place, at the same time, on the same bus.

After school on Monday, I picked up my kids and we fought our way across Amsterdam Avenue to stand at the bus stop, where 15 other people milled around waiting. The bus was full when it came, but we all shoved ourselves on. Somewhere at the back, a woman squawked. Someone else screamed to keep the doors open. The bus lurched to a stop every two blocks and, after converging with the traffic on Broadway, ground to a complete halt. A woman crammed in next to me apologised for pushing past and said: "Watch out for that guy in black, he just touched me and said, 'You look good.'" New York was back, as they say.

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