The story so far: Last month Richard forgot our 25th anniversary. I reminded him on the day and was given a small box of Hallowe’en chocolates from the deli and a branded merchandise necklace from the office where he’d had a meeting that morning. “It’s jewellery,” he said defensively, “and the chocolates were the most expensive ones they had.” He really is romantic.

Last week was his birthday, so I gave him a pair of earrings I thought he might enjoy seeing me wear, a pair of soft cotton pyjamas he would appreciate I’d been wanting for ages, and the excellent news that we’re getting a pair of chickens to live in our backyard so he can have fresh eggs. He loves pets. Oh no, sorry, that’s me. He hates pets. But he does quite like eggs. For a birthday treat, I planned a surprise trip: we went two stops on the subway to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and it turns out the West Village isn’t the only place of wonder round here The two square miles of Williamsburg are a classy, sepia mixture of old brownstones, factories, loft conversions, markets, artisan shops, quirky bars, bakeries, bicycles, graffiti and galleries.

And then, just when you’re getting your head around this picturesque Fifties scene, there’s a burnt-out car park and a demolition yard. It’s populated by a cool, bearded, hipster tribe of young professionals, so you can imagine how Richard and I fitted right in — I think we might have been the oldest people who’d ever visited. And in this faded and beautiful borough, the beautiful people have created a kind of Disneyland for themselves.

In the walk between lunch at a street food market and dinner in a converted railway carriage, we passed a boutique bowling alley spilling over with girls in bowling shirts and shorts a 30-year-old brewery in an old matzo factory, where you can drink taster pints from huge steel kegs And a Mexican cafe with a mariachi band stuffed into the corner and customers salsa-dancing between the tables.

Demand outdoing supply

We saw a group of cyclists who’d just completed a scavenger hunt, watching a movie projected on to the wall of a garage found The Escape Room, where young people pay to be locked inside a room with a series of puzzles and can only get out if they solve them all within an hour And we went into the Videology Cinema Bar, where my teenagers play Twin Peaks bingo on Thursdays — “Eyes down for a shot of a dead tree”.

They were preparing the room for “F-- That Movie” night, when a panel discusses films they most hate. We left before anyone had a chance to mention one of Richard’s.

The curious thing here is that demand is clearly outdoing supply, as there are queues for absolutely everything, absolutely everywhere. But unlike the Curtis family — who are dreadful in a queue, even on a birthday — nobody seems to mind.

The average wait for a restaurant table is 45 minutes — and the line to buy a drink in a cool hotel roof bar was around an hour. It’s puzzling, until you look at the rents The average one-bed apartment in the New York area is £497 (Dh2,785) a week. As space is so precious, flats are mostly tiny: so Williamsburg provides a playground where young people can spend their whole weekends. They leave their confined compartments in the morning with backpacks and skinny jeans and spend the day in this urban sweet shop, drifting from restaurant to shop to activity, without agenda or time limit, and clearly not desperate to rush back home. It’s not so much an area defined by anxiety about how long your burger is taking, it’s more a neighbourhood redefined as an Adult (though not in that way) Amusement Park. And it is amusing.

And relaxing, and friendly. On the way home, having bought Richard a lovely pair of vintage kitten heels, we walked through the massive industrial spiderweb of iron that makes up Williamsburg Bridge and saw the most fitting graffiti for this paradoxical area, written large on a huge girder. It simply read SNUGGLES.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, 
London, 2015