Why, it's a perfect little city. If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful. - Bill Bryson

I went round to all these minority sports and I couldn't really appreciate them. Fencing, for example, is just "click, click, click" and it is over. Then they retire. Then they go again "On guard — click, click, click" and it is over again. You just think, "what is this sport?" I thought this is really boring and then I went to Judo and it was just the same thing. These two guys just endlessly circling each other, acting as if what they are trying to do is take the others shirt off without him realising this is what they are trying to do. I just thought "what is this? I don't understand this at all". Then I went to table tennis, which obviously I could identify with because I had played it myself — not quite at Olympic standard — but I could understand it. It suddenly became clear to me that these people really are so far beyond anything I could ever dream of becoming. I felt really terrible because I hadn't appreciated the fencers. The reason I couldn't follow them was because they were so damn good. Their hands were so quick that I couldn't see what was going on.

On Fifth Avenue I went into the Trump Tower, a new skyscraper. A guy named Donald Trump, a developer, is slowly taking over New York, building skyscrapers all over town with his name on them, so I went in and had a look around. The building had the most tasteless lobby I had ever seen — - all brass and chrome and blotchy red and white marble that looked like the sort of thing that if you saw it on the sidewalk you would walk around it. Here it was everywhere — - on the floors, up the walls , on the ceiling. It was like being inside somebody's stomach after he'd eaten pizza.

Confused and unable to help, my hair went into panic mode.