Day 30 + 8 = 38 - Happy birthday Simon. There will be short delay in transmission, until we can find suitable internet capabilities. We will resume normal programming as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

In which we get mugged on Broadway - but I'll get to that in due course.

Another New York cliche - frequent blaring of car horns - would seem to indicate one of two things - either ''Hey, howya doin'?'' or ''Hey, get the hell outa my way!'' - possibly sometimes both, it's hard to tell.

Raced down to Times Square after another Starbucks start to the day - and by raced, I mean stopping at nearly every gift store along about three street blocks until we actually got to our destination. Consequently didn't get on the bus until about 10.45. Another excellent guide commentator. Got off near the site of Ground Zero, but because we hadn't pre-booked tickets, we weren't able to go in to see a preview of the actual memorial site. Instead however, on the advice of someone who had only been here recently [thanks Janey, excellent suggestion] we went instead to St. Paul's chapel, the 200 year old chapel very near to the site which served as a source of respite, comfort, pastoral care and physical care (e.g. massage and even chiropody), and eventually became a memorial and tribute in its own right, almost unofficially. A very touching and poignant (? overused?) reminder of the horror of the day, but also of the bravery and strength of character that followed. To see the site where so much devastation occurred within such a relatively small area whilst sparing so many buildings close by was also astounding.

And so, by way of contrasting this particularly sobering experience, we went shopping......for about three hours. Felt like three weeks. It turns out that shopping in New York isn't a whole lot cheaper (yes, cheaper, but not so much as to justify the airline fare alone), but is certainly a whole lot louder - I'm not entirely sure how turning the music volume UP makes people want to go IN to the store. I am also fairly convinced that in most of the store we went into, the sales staff out-numbered customers.

Back on the bus to get back to TS (as we now refer to it - or at least as I am referring to it for the purpose of brevity (!!)) to see if we could get tickets for a Broadway show - and here's where we got mugged......we did get tickets. If anyone ever had the thought ''Hey, why don't we make a musical about the cartoon character Spiderman?'', then the resultant musical, 'Spiderman - Turn off the Dark' is an excellent reason why the answer should have been ''Because it's a stupid idea''. A more appropriate title would have been 'Spiderman - Turn off the Show''. The music and lyrics were by Bono and The Edge of U2 - excellent pedigree, but perhaps they should stick to Rock and Roll and saving the world. Perhaps one decent tune, which got repeated a number of times, either because it was so good, or because they realised the rest was rubbish and couldn't come up with anything better. There were even a couple of U2 references within the show, and a couple of the songs had very strong U2 influence, but not enough to keep its head above water. The show's saving grace was the theatrics, the props and the acrobatics - eye-popping and mesmerising, but unfortunately still not enough to recommend it. Thankfully it will not be moving from New York - ostensibly on logistical grounds, but also presumably on artistic grounds. Well at least we can say we have seen a Broadway production.

Prior to the show we did try to get into the spirit of the evening by having dinner at Hard Rock cafe - got excited as saw original dot-to-dot drawings that John Entwistle had made of each of The Who band members for the Who By Numbers album. Sadly, even this was not enough to buoy the latter part of the evening.

Also of interest, on the bus, the tour guide informed us that there are only six petrol stations in the whole of Manhattan (standing population of about 1.2 million, with an extra daily influx of about 5 million), whereas there are about 253 Starbucks outlets - I suppose it is kind of a fuel source.