Virginia Blackburn

START spreading the news. I got back from New York yesterday. This has become an annual jaunt as I have a close friend who lives there and every year I find out something else that makes it all the more intriguing. This time it was that the Statue of Liberty is not actually in New York at all but in the state of New Jersey. Last year it was that Times Square is not so much a square as a large corner. As for it being the city that never sleeps, it can be remarkably difficult to make a restaurant reservation after 10pm. Parts of New York conform to the image of constantly honking yellow taxis but go to Lower Manhattan, where you find places such as Greenwich Village (“the Village” to those in the know) and you find leafy parks and quiet backstreets. So green was the foliage and hot was the weather one night that I was there that I could have been in the Deep South.

And yet New York – and the rest of the United States – is different from Europe in some profound ways. For a start there’s that much-touted American Dream but the people really do believe in it.

President Clinton is just one in a long line of many who went out of his way to boast about his poverty-stricken background. Contrast that with John Major who, when he became PM, was clearly somewhat embarrassed by his humble start in Brixton. The log cabin in which Abraham Lincoln was born is long gone but it lives on in the collective memory. Americans respect people who achieve success after a disadvantageous start in life. They don’t go on about nouveaus as we tend to do here.

The United States is still palpably a young country while we in Europe are not. And just as young men and women think they can achieve anything that OXBRIDGE is in the firing line again for having accumulated billions of pounds of wealth. Look, it is home to some of the cleverest people in the country. Wouldn’t the real shock be if it was poor?