A few minutes before midnight on 31 December 2011, I arrived at a warehouse party in lower Manhattan pulsating to the tune of ‘Pumped Up Kicks’. At the time, I was living with my then-partner in San Francisco, where he worked for a Silicon Valley start-up while I interned at a museum. We’d started our relationship the previous year, when we were both young Australians studying in Europe (me in London, he in Paris), but we’d recently moved on from the Old World to the New. Obama’s America, land of hope and possibility. Now here I was, high on the false maturity of 23, welcoming in 2012 in Gotham City, the Big Apple itself, surrounded by beautiful young things. I’d left Newcastle behind; I’d made it to the beating heart of the universe.