I can still remember the sense of excitement and wonder of first going to New York. The knockout skyline, the brutal candour (“You think you can get in here dressed like that? Get real, honey!”) and the wry cynicism all wowed me. What I hadn’t been expecting – indeed, what was shocking in its unexpectedness – was the bureaucracy. You couldn’t pick up the phone and get anything done; you had to send a fax before they would even consider speaking to you (these days, you have to send an e-mail). There was a sense of complacency that baffled me. Where was the famous efficiency, the work ethic? In London (this was the 1980s) we all worked until 7 or 8pm, routinely; here they knocked off for cocktails at 5.30pm.

A couple of decades on and the invincibility of New York remains legendary. If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere . . . Well, try telling that to Rudy Giuliani, who staked it all on Florida and lost. The former Mayor of New York will not be the next President of the United States, nor even its Republican presidential candidate, and his loss set me thinking about arrogance, confidence and small-town mentality.

New York is one of the world’s greatest cities, but it is half the size of London: 322 square miles compared with Greater London’s 609 square miles. In reality, much of New York’s action happens in a small island of 23 square miles. Does that mean then that, say, our own Ken Livingstone would be better equipped to run for the US presidency than Giuliani? Of course it does not (although it is a wonderful thought, isn’t it? Can’t we send him there anyway?), for Ken is, like Giuliani, Mr Arrogant: the Big Fish in what is a very large pond but a nonexistent sea.

As the Conservative MP Derek Conway would no doubt have agreed this time last week, it is very pleasant to be a Big Fish in a large pond.

The sycophants are quick to grease themselves up alongside you, smarming their way into your office, telling you how brilliant you are, how much they agree with what you just said. They are careful not to venture any opinions of their own; they perfect the art of going “mmmm, mmmm” while nodding with a carefully neutral yet pleasant expression.

Even enormous fish – the great white sharks in the business or political oceans, so to speak – regularly fail to spot these sycophants, and instead draw the smarmiest ones ever closer, becoming sycophant-dependent, so to speak.

In Mr Conway’s case the arrogance extended into paying his children ludicrous sums of money for work they apparently did for him while simultaneously studying full time at university. I am sure that even now he feels wronged by all the hoo-hah (although certainly its tone is mighty unpleasant – how vile people are when talking about money) because, like many Big Fish in large ponds, he has lost sight of what is acceptable behaviour and what isn’t.

Who hasn’t had experience of the teacher who, like Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (played in the film with exquisitely vicious politesse by Imelda Staunton) relishes dishing out humiliation when someone makes a mistake, or the boss who craves homogeneity (“people like us”) and rewards that while stifling creativity and diversity?

You can be a flamboyant Big Fish who makes a lot of splash, but then lose yourself completely when, flung into the dangerous swell of the ocean, you realise that you never properly learnt how to swim on your own.

On Libby Purves’s Midweek programme on Radio 4 yesterday morning, there was a wonderful man who had been left a tetraplegic after breaking his spine at the age of 16, jumping off a haystack. He went on to become a champion at wheelchair rugby and wheelchair tennis and said that people who didn’t know him often accused him of being arrogant. That was wrong, he said; he wasn’t arrogant, simply confident. The difference between the two, he explained, is that confidence is what you have when you know you can do something; arrogance is what you have when you think you can do something that you can’t.

Apart from the few years he spent in Washington, working for the Deputy Attorney-General, Rudy Giuliani has spent all his life in New York. He was born there, went to school and university there, became a lawyer there and, in 1993, became its mayor. Contrast that with the experience of John McCain, who beat him to win the Florida Republican nomination, or that of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

According to the US Office of Central Statistics, 82 per cent of Americans don’t own a passport, and certainly they could do with getting out more. (I always remember once in Cincinnati asking one of the people I was with – a 25-year-old who worked for Procter & Gamble, if memory serves – if he’d ever been to Europe; he looked at me as though I was insane. “Hell no,” he said. “Why would I want to go there? I haven’t even been to California yet.”) Nevertheless, the experience of Giuliani would seem to show that you can’t become the President of one of the greatest countries in the world without having gone a little farther afield than your home city, which is just as it should be.

Meanwhile, we minnows can comfort ourselves with the thought that the Big Fish mentality is less a symptom of geography and more a state of mind.

You can live in the smallest village and have a mind vast in its flexibility and reach, a mind that retains humility and flexibility and curiosity. And there is an added bonus: such minds tend to be virtually sycophant proof.

Just say no to the effluent society

Talking of state of mind, I had not been aware of being in the prolonged despair that is the midlife crisis. But it appears that I am intractably caught in the gunk – grease, peas, bits of rice – at the bottom of life’s U-bend that begins with birth and ends with death.

This news coincided with figures showing that couples earning £88,000 a year are officially classed as rich but don’t feel it; and that people spent much less on their mortgage or rent in 1957, and much more on enjoying themselves.

It seems that extensive research has found that the U-bend depression hits everyone, regardless of geography, gender, class or income, and doesn’t start to lift until you’re in your fifties. That’s quite a while to be spending in effluent, I thought, which is when I had my U-bend epiphany: if I’m going to be miserable for years, I may as well accept it. And if I’m accepting it then I may as well stop moaning. Let’s take our cue from 1957 and enjoy ourselves instead. After all, the only way now is up.

Lotto will provide

Last week I wrote about the stress of mothers whose children are sitting exams. I’m indebted to the reader who pointed out that my classification system – the Completely Competent Mother, the Upwardly Mobile Mother and the Unprepared Mother – was incomplete. “I think you forgot one category,” he wrote. “The HITS, or Head In The Sand mum, who spends every evening in intense discussions with her husband about what will happen if their child actually does get into one of these schools. The words ‘afford’, ‘how’ and ‘the f***’ often creep into conversation, brought to a temporary halt only by pretending everything will be all right because there’s a double rollover on Saturday. So I’ve been told, anyway.”

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