Manhattan transfer – Frank McNally on a family weekend in New York

When agreeing in a weak moment a while back to treat my three young-adult children to a weekend to New York, I vaguely imagined we would be staying in Manhattan.

Then the appalling cost of booking two rooms there dawned, so I started searching in Queens instead. And finally, we ended up way out on Long Island, from where Manhattan was only a rumour.

There, at a mere $370 a night, we got a bed and breakfast for four. Even when you added the combined $40 each way for train tickets to the city, it was still the most competitive option.

Our host was a former New York fireman, retired since before 9/11 although he had still responded to the mayday call.

Taking a brave stand – John Mulqueen on women and politics

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Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

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In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

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Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

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A tough-talking Italian-American, he made a fine blueberry pancake, served with political opinions, all of them strong. His pancakes were blue, but his politics mostly red (in the American rather than European sense): the keynote being a belief that the country was run by “communists”.

He also mentioned that he did a bit of “hedging” on the side, which at first I thought meant he was a gardener. In fact, it turned out to be financial hedging. This required that he foretell the future, something he was apparently good at, even if his predictions included the break-up of EU.

In general, he believed nothing happened by accident – 9/11 not excepted. There was no way those buildings fell just because of the planes, he insisted. But he declined to identify who had done it or why, other than to note that it justified suspension of certain civil liberties and to quote something his uncle (who worked in the CIA) used to say: “This is a beautiful country. It takes a lot to keep it that way.”

Our B&B was not so much in the middle of nowhere as in its outer suburbs. There was even a town called “Hicksville” nearby, albeit the name derived from a family called Hicks, and was not necessarily a description of the inhabitants.

Impressively in a car-obsessed country, however, there was a Long Island Rail Road stop just opposite us. Services were infrequent, alas. So on a couple of occasions our host drove us to a local hub four miles away, where the LIRR called more often. From there, in under an hour, we were whisked into the magnificent Grand Central Station.

He also warned us not to take the subway in New York, suggesting it was full of dangerous crazies. But we took it anyway, because apart from life itself, it’s one of the few things in the city that come cheap.

And for us at least, it felt at least as safe as the Luas Red Line. The only muggings we experienced were overground, usually accompanied by a credit-card receipt on which you were expected to add a 25 per cent tip to the already-exorbitant bill.

I cut corners where possible. After forking out for four tickets to the Broadway musical Hadestown (a modern retelling of the Orpheus and Euridice story, which is also about people who risk the underground, with less happy results), for example, I decided I wasn’t wealthy enough to buy interval drinks.

A glass of wine cost $22, after all. In the meantime, my dehydrated sons opted to buy bottles of water from their own modest cash reserves and came back rattled, having paid $7 each.

And yet, almost inexplicably, there are still some free things in the land of the expensive. These include the wonderful Staten Island ferry, which we took at sunset, returning half an hour later for a view of the greatest light show on earth, neither costing a cent.

Walking the streets – always entertaining in New York – is still free too, so we did a lot of that. More than planned, sometimes. Rather than wait for the train to our local stop one night, we caught one to the aforementioned hub, hoping to get a taxi the rest of the way.

But no taxis passed there, as we discovered, not even Uber ones. We had to walk home instead. In places, the route didn’t appear to have footpaths and there was not a single other pedestrian to be seen anywhere. I wondered seriously if me and my displaced Children of LIRR were the first people who had ever walked that way.

Next morning over pancakes, our incredulous host (who had been asleep at the time) insisted we should have called him, and kept calling if necessary, rather than risk such an intrepid journey. Of one part of the route, he suggested laughingly that we had been “brave” to pass through it after midnight.

But there had been nobody there either and, living as I do in inner-city Dublin, it looked positively bourgeois to me.

I like to think that if we had come to the attention of any local muggers, noting our pedestrian habits, they would have avoided us as dangerous crazies.