[This is an ongoing travelogue of my life and work in games journalism as I travel from London through New York to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Regular excerpts will be available at this website for free, and a full version will be available to buy for $3 in digital formats when it’s finished. Hope you enjoy coming along with me!]

I lived in New York City for ten years, and I come and go a lot these days. But it never really goes away, that thing where I’m riding the last escalator out of Penn Station, with its unmistakable collision of food smells and noise, and the corner of 34th street appears, in all its un-splendor, suddenly. It’s ratty and smoky and lousy with fake Irish pubs and “stage door” bars blocks away from any actual stage, but it feels like I’m home.

“Hello, Baby,” I mouth softly to no-one.

I’m in this “cantina” restaurant across the street from the New Yorker hotel. I picked it because there is guacamole on the menu. They have guacamole in the UK, sort of, a runny chartreuse cream dotted with what they call “coriander,” but it just barely qualifies.

I used to live here. Like literally right here, in the hotel across the street. The hotel is an old, looming art deco tower that was aging badly when I came ten (!) years ago and that seems to be aging worse alongside glass and chrome lobby renovations. At the time I lived there, an entire floor of the building was being used as a sort of dormitory for students of the acting conservatory I came to the city to attend. There was some kind of partnership with the school.

I don’t know if the hotel still does the dormitory thing with acting students, but all these very young, very beautiful, very worn and hungry kids I sometimes see smoking on the sidewalk suggests it does. Back in those days I would have the same breakfast every morning, without fail: an everything bagel, toasted, no butter, and a black coffee, no sugar, no milk. You eventually get to ordering bodega coffee in English, but with a Spanish grammar pattern. You ask for a small-coffee-black. And you say “can I also have a coffee” and not “coffee, too” because otherwise you’ll get two coffees.

Now I’m a game journalist. Surviving and working as an actress in this city looked like it was going to be a profoundly inhumane way for someone with my frailties to try to live. The older I get the more surviving in this city seems like it’d be inhumane for nearly anybody.

Right now as I write this there are a couple of prematurely balding suits at the cantina bar next to me talking shop over tequila. It’s not quite 2:00 in the afternoon. One guy is talking very fast, very aggressively. It sounds like career advice. It could even be a job interview. “You’re like, ‘I want to break loose in the industry, I want to be successful’,” he’s saying, “then you get in, right, and you’ll be working with me right at the top, and then all you’re really doing is emailing and calling international travel agencies.”

He says, “Typically the people that handle international travel are, like, these hot bitches… you’re going to be speaking their language, you’ll be this hot guy, and then you’re going to do sales trips.”

Neither of the guys in suits are hot.

“If I were you I would also create a LinkedIn,” the guy says. “Do you have one? Create one right now.”

I feel glad I don’t have a real job. Definitely, definitely coming back to Manhattan like this feels like I’m home and like I dodged a bullet at exactly the same time. Thanks to jet lag I wake up at 7:30 AM the next day in my friend Rachel’s bed, the earliest slivers of light carving the silhouette of a fire escape into her drawn curtain. I haven’t lived or worked in Manhattan since 2006, and yet the coupling of wan, steely dawn and the sigh of a million engines waking up, cabs and commuters coming to life slowly, wraps a fist around my heart. There’ll be the roar of traffic and a cacophony of car horns very, very soon, but for now it’s soft and far away, like a low tide at sunrise.

I shrug back into the old uniform of us regular city people, the kind that just blow around and through here forever: pugnacious sneakers, leggings, unwashed hair. New Yorkers are only fashion plates in the imagination of Sex & the City fans. I shiver down four flights of concrete stairs, shuffle down the sidewalk. Most everything is shuttered this early in the morning, but the bagel cafe is open.

I get them: A black, unsweetened coffee and a huge, toasted everything bagel. When I get back indoors to sit on the floor and eat, cross-legged on varnished wood beside the hissing radiator, I can’t believe how evocative it smells: Waxy deli cup, bitter deli coffee, and the bagel, huge and substantial and whorled like an ammonite. I peel it into sections and dip it in the coffee like I’m eating an artichoke.

Rachel has joined the sea of commuters. Moving to Manhattan from Brooklyn was, for her, a luxury of her recent career success. She had a series of bad luck working at startups, working for one too many pie-eyed CEOs who’d surf self-indulgently around and then catch a gilded parachute out of town, leaving her and others laid off.

One of her old bosses was a startup artist who now seems to be focused full-time on his band, whose marketing materials on the internet promise “a mix of Arcade fire and Snow Patrol.”  He even has an expensive-looking music video we love to watch with the roommates when we’re stoned. It’s funny. I’m happy she finally has a job she loves, now. She works long hours and still manages to get to the gym six days a week.

I’m left alone in the apartment like a latchkey kid. I mean. It’s not like I don’t have a job too, I’m thinking, stripping off my leggings and getting back into bed. I’ll send some important GDC emails when I wake up. I just can’t get up this early any more.

I sleep til noon. Luxury comes in all kinds of forms.