Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
The first time we visited New York together was in 2001.
We stayed then at what was essentially a souped-up youth hostel; we had bunk beds and plastic sheets and no hot water.
We got attacked by a swan in Central Park. I recall that at one point, cold and jetlagged, I burst into tears in the middle of the Museum of Modern Art. It was not the most romantic of occasions.
This time is different. We fly over the Atlantic Ocean on a business-only 48-passenger aircraft, which is quite the most opulent thing I have ever done. We stay at the delightful Hotel le Bleu, with plumptious eiderdowns and showerheads as big as dinner plates.
We chose to stay in Brooklyn rather than Manhattan. This part of New York is an exciting place to be at the moment: over the last decade or so it has become a honeypot for musicians, artists and not to mention dot.com firms, stockbrokers and families priced out of Manhattan.
Accordingly, there are moochy little coffee shops galore, a proliferation of music venues and vintage stores with price tags far below those of Greenwich Village. The laid-back feel of Brooklyn is also much more conducive to romance than the constant fuss and bustle of Manhattan; it's the kind of place where you can stroll along quiet streets and linger over dinner at a neighbourhood restaurant.
We draft no grand plans for our brief jaunt, no treks to the Empire State Building, nor excursions to Coney Island; instead we fill our 48 hours in the city happily pottering.
On the first evening we roam around Brooklyn's Park Slope neighbourhood and it is so cold our breath blooms white.
We pop in to a comic shop and pause to wonder at the window display of the Superhero Supply Company, stocked with cartons of antimatter, cans labelled "Negative Energy" and packets of spiderwebs.
It is in fact a children's writing workshop affiliated to Dave Eggers's 826 Valencia project in San Francisco. Then, as jetlag slowly drifts over us, we dine at the Stone Park Cafe on the corner of 5th and 3rd, and tumble home to bed.
In the morning, we breakfast handsomely, visit the neighbourhood flea market, then head over to Manhattan, to the Lower East Side, where the New Museum has been rehomed in a $64 million building.
We meander through the streets, along Rivington, Stanton, Delancey, and refuel at a place named Rice to Riches, on Spring Street, which offers a squillion different flavours of pudding such as pumpkin pie and blueberry.
We hop over to MoMA and take in the Martin Puryear, Lucian Freud and Latin Art exhibitions. And when all the walking and all the boutiquing and gallerying grows wearisome we stop for a cup or two of Brooklyn's finest at a pleasingly moody little bar on Ludlow Street before heading to dinner at Public, a restaurant on Elizabeth Street, in the NoLita district. A little truffled beet and ginger risotto, a little lemon thyme fizz, a little dimly-lit conversation over mango and vanilla mojitos, and we have all the ingredients for a heart-filling evening.
Hotel Le Bleu, 370 4th Avenue, Brooklyn (+17186251500, hotellebleu.com) doubles from $221 per night B&B.
