HERE ARE the pictures that return to my mind. A picnic among lolloping squirrels in the Public Garden, yellow sunlight streaming down through yellowing leaves. Saturday morning in the North End, all southern Italians and sensory assault espresso mixed in with garlicky calamari. Sunday afternoon on Newbury Street, jazz bands playing in front of the old brownstones that have mutated discreetly into shops. Boston in late October, still turned inside out onto its sunny streets and at home we are scurrying into our winter woollies.
New England in the fall. It sounds like such a threadbare travel cliche that when you get there, it takes you by surprise. Even without leaving the heart of the city even without walking more than half way across the Common, to the point where the 23 carat gold State House dome glints through the trees you see what all the fuss is about. Colours more colours than on a sheaf of Dulux shade cards, from lemon to saffron to russet to plum.
For years New York had no rival, for me, among American cities. I love it still but see it now, with its petulant, extreme behaviour, more as a dangerous liaison thrilling in measured doses. Boston is the one to which I would keep returning and have kept returning. Four, five visits now, and every time it offers more.
You could take your granny to Boston and show her a good time, even if you never got much further than Trinity Church (where Erskine Childers was married), and the mirrored pillar of the John Hancock Tower across the way. Take the elevator up to the 60th floor for a view matched in its magnificence by the voice of the late Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston's great architectural historian, describing all that you see. Old Boston, civilised and gracious, survives. Since 1912 Proper Attire Required warns a notice on the Copley Plaza Hotel next door. Elderly gents in braces and spotted bow ties are fixtures in the bar, and could teach gran with disconcerting speed how to have up martinis.
You could also take a child to Boston, if you have one to spare, and share the fun of the Boston Tea Party ship, the Aquarium and the ingenious Children's Museum (not to mention frozen hot chocolate in Serendipity one of the few worthwhile things in Quincy Market). Or just go with a good friend and start walking. Not the Freedom Trail, necessarily tourists cluster like ants along the red line on the pavement linking Revolutionary landmarks. Wander, instead, among narrow streets of even narrower brick houses on Beacon Hill handsomely restored remnants of old decency, where chandeliers still shimmer. Explore Harvard best known of the 33 institutions of higher learning that give Boston its intellectual gloss, and its huge influx of students. When, after all the highbrow stuff, some reward seems due, you can always plunge into Filene's basement, along with your Aer Lingus cabin crew, and trawl for a designer bargain.
Much is made of Boston's Irishness. There are Irish voices, certainly Irish bars and Irish Americana spilling out in all directions from old Fitzgerald and Kennedy haunts. In a curious and profound way, though, Boston is more English than Irish, with its Puritan beginnings, its restrained manners and whatever remains of its old money. And in the best English tradition, it has superb eccentrics. One of the first was the Rev. William Blackstone an Anglican who lived with the Indians on Beacon Hill in the 1620s, and was apparently inclined, after a few drinks, to ride a red bull naked along the banks of the Charles River.
My favourite, however, is Isabella Stewart Gardner, the wealthy, zany socialite whose Venetian style palazzo, crammed with her formidable art collection, is one of the city's most delightful museums. This feisty lady, who loved to shock staid Boston, had her portrait painted by Sargent in the 1880s equivalent of spray on lycra she wore diamonds on wires, like antennae, sticking up out of her hair, and walked her pet lions on Beacon Street. Her favourite party food, I seem to have heard, was doughnuts with champagne.
The doughnuts are still around, but overshadowed, these days, by cafe latte and cafe au lait, macchiato, Americano and Colombian decaff. The Seattle coffee craze has set up shop on the east coast more reason than ever to forego the hotel breakfast. In fact, the whole Boston food scene has moved a long way beyond clam chowder and beans in the past few years. Global gourmets can drool over the Vietnamese pork spring rolls in Sonsie one night, eat Thai on Massachusetts Avenue the next then haul on the cowboy boots for a plate of snakebites in the Cottonwood Cafe. Or you might just blow your whole week's budget on some blissful culinary invention of Lydia Shire's at Biba.
Don't say a word about the place losing its true Yankee flavour, though. At Charlie's Sandwich Shoppe, they've been serving monster platters of breakfast pancakes for over O years with no sign of a let up in the queue. And somewhere, not far away, somebody is whacking a baseball.
