The stories, oh, the stories. They just keep piling up on my head, falling in layers higgledy-piggledy, like a layer cake sloppy with lemon buttercream icing, and me with not a second to grab a fork. Just over the jet lag of the Far East, I worked through three solid weeks of late nights and freelance edits, then fell asleep in a plane on an errand-running trip to New York City.

What is not such a fun e-mail to receive is the one from the cousin with whom I’d engaged in a trans-Atlantic flat swap. “There is one thing I must talk to you about,” she wrote. There is always the one thing! Sometimes the one thing is the last cupcake in the box, and sometimes the one thing is a cousin falling in with an Englishman and moving back to London. The glory days in Covent Garden, we knew they were not to last. It’s FINE, though, because I think a new neighbourhood will be a good change of scene, even if it means I will once again be joining the ranks of the honest, rent-paying folk.

Interestingly, a soon-to-be-empty flat in Brooklyn means I am also poised to be an absentee landlord. This cannot help but be an interesting story. “I have these friends who are slumlords, no, but, really, they are slumlords,” Jazon said over eggs and coffee at Belleville, and I wondered where that story was going. My story, though, after the last-minute flight to a past life and a long weekend of packing – I thought I’d gotten rid of all this stuff when I moved the last time, but twelve salvaged Fresh Direct boxes of books and a couple of hefty crates of school papers were happy to prove me wrong – its wheels are in motion. Amazing what a girl can do when she puts her mind to it – and when she’s got an outbound flight booked for seven days’ time. The supers were revisited, the realtor was met, the workmen were interviewed. One painter, he has a wonderful name, was called Johnny Mac.

There wasn’t quite time for kicking around the old haunts, but Park Slope at one in the morning, as I came off the train from JFK, smelt, cleanly, like home. In the morning, the bakery on the next block is still selling triberry scones. The guy who looks like he’s a stand-up comic on his nights off still works at Dizzy’s, and the diner is still a good place to sit in the sun to finish a book. One afternoon, my legs took me places before my brain caught up, and I sat down to grilled squid and chillied mango slivers in a cool corner opposite the carved rosewood bar at Mekong.

Two years after my last plane out of Queens, New York is still great. “Shit,” CC and I e-mailed, “New York is great.” The thing is, it is, and it is in a way London really isn’t. Where a life seemed to shimmer with possibility in New York, here it wavers hesitantly. Much of my ambivalence towards this city, I know, comes from the wearisome fact of finances and the hunt for a job. “We’re all running like mad to stay still,” Dan said to me once. I wanted to cry, it was so true and I was so tired.

Wednesday afternoon on Eastern Parkway, the car service taking me to the airport passed the kids just out of school. The plane took off as the sun set. Every time I come back to London I’m geared up to make another go of it.