Two months have now passed since the trip I am attempting to describe, because life, as it is so wont to do, got in the way. But I hate to leave anything unfinished – so let’s test how good my memory is.

On my fourth day in NY, Annie and I set out in the afternoon on a tour of the city she’d planned for me revolving around historic spots. Annie knows I love this sort of thing – I took on a history-themed bar crawl I concocted inLondon a couple of years ago. We ate sandwiches in a park, then crossed the Brooklyn Bridge to begin the day – sun beating down, cloudless sky. I was wearing a slim-fit white t-shirt and a backpack, and as we wound through the commuters and tourists, I was mildly aware of the fact that my backpack was hoisting up the fabric of my t-shirt, giving the appearance of tits. I was in a giddy, hungover mood, singing Blink 182 songs and prodding Annie to sing along with me. Annie, not being one for mornings and sunshine, was rather less gleeful.

I found the bridge interesting, but in truth I think it’s one of those structures that’s better viewed from elsewhere – when you’re on it, you can’t see it. You can see the city, of course, sheer and glassy, but all the great brown girders and coiled wires block criss-crossing it slightly dampens the majesty.

We arrived on the far side, sweaty and white heat woozy, and I laughed to hear a couple of Yorkshire accents as a group of girls passed us chatting. This area – the Manhattan side of the bridge – is called Dumbo, which I quite enjoyed. We stopped at a bar, thirsty, and sat in the sun listening to a drunken man from Boston tell stories to his girlfriend in a strange, boisterous cadence and obscure syntax I found fascinating to listen to.

Warmed up, we visited the oldest pub (and building outright) in the city – a lopsided, creaky old place called Fraunces Tavern. Annie told me it was heavily involved in the American Revolution; it was a meeting place for a group called the ‘Sons of Liberty’ (I don’t know who they are – they don’t teach us this stuff in UK schools). It was a revolutionary hub; after a young Alexander Hamilton fired commandeered cannons at British ships in the harbour, the British fired back, putting a cannonball through the pub’s roof, and years later, George Washington held a banquet there to bid farewell to his troops when the war was won.

We headed uptown, stopping at the vast Strand Bookstore, which Annie frequented during her college years. We browsed old tomes in the vintage section – I found a first edition of A Farewell To Arms worth $1500 – before walking a few blocks to pass by Annie’s old university halls. I was expecting something more grand, more frat-house American. They actually looked a bit like my halls in Newcastle; boxy and unsightly.

“I wonder if any of your DNA’s still in there,” I said, as we passed.

“A lot of bodily fluids, for sure,” said Annie.

I ate a slice of pizza bigger than my head – ham and pineapple, mea culpa, Italia – and we stopped for another round of drinks at another ancient pub: McSorely’s. It’s a legendary watering hole, and the alumni roster is rich: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Houdini, John Lennon and Hunter S. Thompson. Oddly enough, I knew of the bar without knowing; during a rather intense Bob Dylan phase I had last year, I went down a rabbit hole on Woody Guthrie – Dylan’s hero. I was interested in his politics, his guitar with its ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ plaque, and his travels. I scrolled through a million photos of him, comparing them with photos of a young Dylan and admiring their vagabond spirit – and one that caught my eye was of a young Woody Guthrie playing guitar in a dusty tavern beside a large log burner, surrounded by old sailors drinking beer from white mugs. Turns out – that was in McSorely’s.

“Holy shit,” I said, upon entry.

The place hasn’t changed a jot in the 80 years since Guthrie sat and played there. I’m a sucker for the cowboy aesthetic – hate anywhere decked out like that in the UK, of course, because it’s manufactured, synthetic – but those old American saloons, it’s really real. Nothing is contrived; they just evolved that way.

There’s sawdust underfoot and the tables are dark wood, everything lamplit – light can’t reach too far through windows crowded with gold lettering – and the cash register is enormous and golden, little mechanical numbers and levers ticking as the till’s rung up. Ancient policeman’s hats sit atop busted drums and guitars on cramped cupboards behind the bar, and the floorboards creak as patrons pull back chairs – wood against wood – while from the walls, littered with sepia pictures and news cuttings, the eyes of five generations stare down at you. It’s another world entirely, through those doors.

“Can we pay on card here?” Annie asked the elderly barman – who of course had a big moustache, moused grey hair, a black bow tie, braces and pinned up sleeves.

“Are ya kidding me?” he said, in a thick, rasping drawl that sounded like something better suited to a Mark Twain novel. “No we don’t take card, god dammit. What kind of place you think this is? We take cash here, only. Paper dollars, ya hear me?”

It took several seconds for us to laugh; he was so New York-tough that it wasn’t immediately clear that he was playing with us.

“Do you have an ATM in here?” Annie asked.

“Sure do. In the back.”

While Annie was gone getting cash, a large man beside me at the bar held out his hand for me to shake.

“Hey man,” he said. “I saw you guys in Fraunces Tavern.”

“No way,” I said. He was right, I realised; we’d sat beside him at the bar. “You’re doing a historic bar crawl too?”

“Something like that,” he said, oddly downbeat and weary for someone who’d just struck up a conversation. “I’m here on business. Thought I’d take in the sights. You British?”

“Yeah. My mate’s from here, she’s giving me a tour.”

“Alright,” said the man. “Let me get those drinks for you.”

He paid for our beers, and I thanked him, grateful and a little bewildered.

The Woody Guthrie table beside the log burner was occupied, so I took a table by the window while Annie waited for the drinks to be poured. It was too much to take in – I need time and quiet in places like that, just as I need time and quiet when looking at a painting. You need to focus to give it the reverence it deserves – to feel the pulse of it, to lift the hairs on your arms.

Annie returned with four little beers in miniature steins.

“Four halves?”

“They don’t sell pints – they only sell them like this, in twos,” she said. “And you can’t buy just one. Beats me why.”

“Huh.”

We cheers and talked and took photos, and I told Annie about how it vexes me, in such old places, to see people in modern clothing.

“It ruins my immersion,” I told her. “I can’t pretend I’ve travelled back in time if there’s some knob in a neon-green polo smack in the middle of it all.”

Any anachronism in such a place offends my eyes – I never realised until recently how affected I am by aesthetics. I hate seeing powerlines when I’m out in nature, or angular new buildings incongruous in a street of otherwise beautiful olden-days masonry. Sportswear is the one that irks me the most, however – especially when travelling. I get that it’s comfy; I just want to know when exactly the world decided ‘to hell with cultural attire, to hell with cliques and trends – let’s just all wear sport jerseys and tracksuit bottoms.’ You’ve got to strain harder to romanticise things when the outfits are so glaringly misplaced.

Still – McSorely’s evokes the past better than any bar I’ve ever stepped foot in. I liked it very much.

We went to a show after, and by this point I’d long since lost all sense of direction in the city. Annie had bought tickets as a surprise, bless her, for a comedian she’d been sending me reels of on Instagram for weeks – Sarah Keyworth. The whole show was crowd work – totally off the cuff stuff, entirely based around audience interaction. Me being me, I immediately ruled out the idea of sitting anywhere remotely near the front. Back row, ideally, in fact.

“Hell no boys,” said Annie. “We’re going front row.”

Now: allow me to explain my feelings towards crowd work shows. I know and understand, logically, that I cannot die from embarrassment. I also know that nobody in the crowd gives the slightest shit about me, and if I were to be called upon by the comedian to speak, whatever I came out with would not stick in the mind of a single audience member for more than sity seconds. They ask where you’re from and what you do, you tell them, they make a few jokes – that’s it. The show moves on.

And yet. I have a bodily, involuntary, visceral reaction to the idea of it. My toes curl, my palms sweat, my eyes swivel. My fear, more than anything, is not that I’ll say something stupid, or offensive, or bizarre – but that I’ll be bland. That I will be so painfully, sigh-inducingly dull that the comedian will find nothing of humour in my response whatsoever and will crash and burn as a result.

And yes – I know I’m not boring! I know I have lived an interesting life and I am rather a fun person to chat to. It’s an illogical, irrational fear – but it lives gut deep, and I’m willing to bet it would take more than a couple of public speaking classes to fix it.

We compromised on the fifth row.

The show was fantastic. Keyworth – English and the same age as me – was hilarious, expertly catching stray details, tying together stories, remembering the names of the two-dozen people they spoke to from the crowd for callbacks. The Americans lapped it up. As a people, they simply have no aversion to making a scene, to bringing the spotlight upon themselves. I’ve never seen a crowd so hungry to be singled out.

Towards the end of the show, Keyworth noted how several members of the audience seemed to be British.

“Do we have any other Brits in here tonight?”

Knees weak, palms sweaty – this was the moment I’d been fearing from the off. I knew what was coming – I knew my friend all too well.

“This guy is!” called Annie, grabbing me with one hand and pointing above my head with the other. “Over here!”

I don’t often panic, you know. I worry and overthink, yeah, but I very rarely panic. I’ve been in many a dire situation in my life – violence, catastrophe, high stakes far from home – and kept my head. It’s an ADHD thing, I think – we’re good in a crisis. Suddenly being shoved into a spotlight I had absolutely no intention of going anywhere near, however – it sends me into meltdown.

“No no no fuck off please please shut up shut up shut up,” I shout-whispered, wrestling Annie’s hand down.

Thankfully, several people had called out at the same time, and the comedian, eyes ticking between each of us, kindly decided to speak to a punter who wasn’t desperately pleading and sweating and weeping and tangled in a silent, confused brawl with the girl beside him.

After the show, we stood outside chatting as everyone filed out, and I felt a little guilty. I wish I could be more like Annie, sometimes – I wish I could give less of a shit about things. She’d taken me to the show as a surprise, thinking I’d love it and get stuck in – and I think in my adrenaline fuelled refusal I’d come across as a bit… well, bonkers, probably.

But then – I’m no stranger to that.