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The last time I went to New York was on Boxing Day 2000, which, just in case anyone thinks I spent the 90s living mid-Atlantically rather than subsisting in my darkened bedroom indulging in light cutting and the fantasy that Alanis Morrisette knew my soul, was also the first time I went to New York. I had a pretty good time, not least of all because I was staying at the amazing and, at least then, newly refurbished (by Ian Schrager and Philippe Starck) Hudson Hotel.

I somewhat hazily recollect seeing some of the sights - MoMA, the Algonquin, Central Station, the Guggenheim, etc. - but the memory of that hotel overwhelms all the others. Perhaps this had to do with the fact that New York experienced the blizzard to end all blizzards that week, and so I was a kept inside a lot of the time (it was also my introduction to the endless hilarity that is American news: Stormwatch 2000! Snowmageddon!! Blizpocalypse!!!). Perhaps it was because one morning while lounging around the foyer trying to look fascinating while getting cappucino froth all down my chin, Goldie Hawn walked by in sunglasses and a fur bolero and fucking smiled at me. But probably it had everything to do with the fact that the Hudson Hotel provides a cornucopia of visual delights. Like this:

The acid yellow escalator of my dreams. I rode the shit out of that thing. And when you step off it? Romantic, whimsical fantasy land, combining the bygone glamour of luxury cruise ship travel with the ultra-modern. Maybe this is what first-class spaceships will look like?

So what I want today is to go back to the Hudson, and maybe also back to that little holiday in 2000. I had just turned twenty-one, and I went to New York alone. I had earned the money that took me there by myself, and I spent every evening by myself, eating in small restaurants when it wasn't snowing, very happily eavesdropping on New Yorkers discussing the countless pharmaceuticals on which they survived, then getting drunk at the bar, smoking (them was the days) and boring the barmen. Something about the futuristic, Blade-Runneresque design made my isolation acute, and I enjoyed it. I felt very grown up and pretty brave for a boy who grew up in a place so rural that we vacationed in God's armpit. And after three days, when the storm cleared and I had explored every corner of the hotel (including the über-masculine library and billiard room), I went out into a snow-covered Central Park domed in azure, and it was more beautiful than I could have imagined.

But, if you can't afford a time machine, a week in the penthouse would do very nicely:

Hudson Hotel, 356 West 58th Street. Single rooms from $175 per night. I couldn't get rates on the Penthouse, but Gridskipper estimates a piddling sum somewhere between $13k and $16k per night. Pocket change, no?