Tall tales from New York

But on Thursday morning, I had a few hours to myself before my flight back and I took the escalator to the top of the Empire State Building. The ticket office was arranged so that a snake queue of hundreds of people could wind itself around the lobby. Very few, though, were visiting, and I was able to walk straight through.

The view from the top was extraordinary: that perfect blue Manhattan sky that is now so famous with silvery streaks of jets flashing across it; the deep blue of the Hudson River with the white streaks of steamers ploughing across it, and the unique cityscape of skyscrapers laid out like Lego bricks beneath my feet.

Then I looked down. Straight down. And swayed and swooned.

For the last 366 days, the Empire State had once again been New York's tallest building. It had held that honour when it was built in 1931, but then, in the early 1970s, the World Trade Centre had worked its way up to 110 storeys and eclipsed it. The Empire State is 102 storeys tall, although the public viewing point is from the 86th storey, 1,050 feet up - about a quarter of a mile.

And it was around the 86th floor that the planes hit 366 days ago. It was at this height 366 days ago that people realised that there was no way out for them - but to jump.

More than 200 of them did so.

The fall would have taken no more than ten seconds - not long enough for them to black out before the ground arrived. One person landed on a firefighter beneath, and killed him outright.

This was the full horror.

EVERYTHING about New York City is big, from the egos to the bar bills, from the buildings to the lunacy. Every traveller who leaves takes a tall tale home with them.

On Tuesday night, I got a table in Bobby Van's steakhouse on 46th Street. It is consistently voted the second best steakhouse in the United States - the best is in Chicago which was a way to go.

The bar was narrow and macho, all carved wood and strong liquor, all cigar smoke and strong language, all braggardy, back-slapping bonhomie fuelled by testosterone. There was the odd woman present: she had the rubbery botoxed lips of a grooper fish and a surgically-enhanced chest so large that if the architects struggling to replace the Twin Towers want inspiration they could just lay her down.

The menu in the restaurant was simple: red meat and red wine, served by waiters in the sort of brown buttoned jackets that old-fashioned ironmongers wear. Having made my choice, I listened in on my neighbours.

On my right was a couple of young men who'd left a major drugs corporation 18 months ago but had just been brought back by the corporation to head up a global sales force of 1,400.

In front of me was part of a UN delegation from a moderate Middle Eastern state, possibly Egypt, in town for George Bush's address. They discussed democracy and death. "Here, democracy is part of life's freedom," said a delegate. "In our country, we hope that democracy is just freedom from death."

And to my left was a trio of traders, one of whom had just clinched an aggregates deal worth $150 million. "Small fry," he said dismissing his day's work.

The steak arrived, the size of a large county, so superbly cooked the knife glided through it. I gave up after an hour, barely half the way through it. The bill arrived, the size of a large country's national debt. But I had my tall New York tale.

THE lunacy could be seen among the grieving at Ground Zero. The ceremony was utterly chaotic. Traffic teemed through the thousands of people on the sidewalk who were mourning the loss of a state of mind. Twenty per cent of all Americans claim to have known someone who was either killed or injured in the September 11 attacks. They mourned them, but also they lamented their new found vulnerability.

Their ancestors had crossed vast oceans a century or more ago to build a new life. Those oceans - which still take six-and-a-half hours with a good tailwind to cross - had kept them isolated and safe ever since. But not any more.

On September 11, 2001, their enemies finally found a way to reach them. It has shaken them to the very core. It has changed their world.

That is what most of them, as they paid their heartfelt respect to the dead, were grieving for on September 11, 2002. But a few of them had the most peculiar way of showing it.

One dumpy fellow walked around dressed in red, white and blue. He wore large Jonathan King-style spectacles which matched the colour of his outfit. Windscreen wipers scraped across the lenses. "They're to wash away all my tears," he said.

Another chap carried a homemade Perspex model of the Twin Towers which he'd rigged up with hundreds of tiny lightbulbs which were powered by a battery-pack rammed down his trousers. "They flash out SOS," he said. "It's my SOS to the world."

Then there was the biker with a beard combed down to his navel. He'd driven up from South Carolina towing a large coffin in which there was a life-size model of Osama bin Laden. He parked up on Church Street next to a huge Chrysler car which had messages scrawled all over it and the legend "let's roll USA" on the fenders.

Its driver had come from Sacrimento via Shanksville, where the fourth plane on 9/11 was crashed. He said he was going to drive the Chrysler from coast to coast until the day he died. "I wanted to give a gift to the American people," he said, "and this journey is my gift. It is my drive for freedom."

THE three winning numbers in New York's weekly lottery are drawn on a Wednesday night. On the night of September 11, 2002, the three numbers were nine, one, one. Just over 4,000 people each won $500. During Wednesday, the nation - already on Orange alert - became increasingly jittery as news broke that two internal flights had been grounded because of suspicious passengers.

On the first flight, a man was reported to have been brandishing a weapon - which turned out to be a flick-comb. On the second, a man was arrested having locked himself in the plane toilet - where he had been shaving his body hair.

HOW many did die in the Twin Towers? At least three people watching TV on Wednesday were shocked to hear their names among the 2,801 being read out as they were still very much alive. Another 50 names are under investigation as police wonder whether their inclusion is a sick joke or an insurance scam.

During the ceremony, though, I got talking to a lady who works in immigration. She believes that there were probably "ten, 50, 100, who knows?" illegal aliens working in the towers doing menial jobs. They were unregistered by the state, unacknowledged by the big companies who could not possibly have been sliding them a few bucks to take the garbage out, and so unknown to the man compiling the final fatality figure.

STATS, though, are integral to the American way of life. In Bobby Van's, the boys knew so many baseball stats about strike outs and home runs that cricket sounded simple by comparison.

The stats of September 11 were everywhere in New York last week. They ran across the neon ticker tape of Times Square and along the screen of the 24/7 news channels. Most newspapers devoted a full page just to stats. Here are a few: 3,051 children lost a parent; 101 babies have been born to a parent who died in the attack; 1,609 people lost a partner; most who died in the Twin Towers were aged between 35 and 39; three men died to every one woman; 19,858 different body parts have been found in the rubble at Ground Zero; 289 bodies were found "intact"; 1,717 bodies have never been found; 1,506,124 tons of debris has been removed from Ground Zero; the US Government has spent $970m cleaning up; $40.2bn has been paid out worldwide in insurance; the World Trade Centre cost $1.1bn to build in 1970; the 19 hijackers were armed with boxcutter knives which cost $4.