Church of the Epiphany, 74th Street, New York City, NYC

Reading Werner Herzog's On Walking in Ice (from which I've quoted heavily below) on a bench on York Avenue. The Church of the Epiphany on York and 74th has a pink marble bench outside, above which hang photocopies on bright paper clothespegged to green wire. A bulletin board and mobile, it dances in the warm wind and flashes pictures of priests and adverts for BIBLE AND BREWSKIS.

On this bench I made a discovery: sitting on benches is publicly accepted, lying on benches is frowned upon, but in between, as your angle approaches but doesn't reach the horizontal, you become more and more interesting to the passerby. First I sat and read with the book in my lap; then I lifted up my stiff left leg in a baseball-slide position; then I reclined as on a chaise longue (a friend of mine slept on a chaise longue at boarding school so I am practised at this) propping up my scarf-swaddled neck on one elbow.

The attention I received from pedestrians doubled with each adjustment. When I was in the last position, reclining in my public boudoir, a distinguished man of fifty who might have been Mayor of the Upper East Side if they had one walked past me and slowed as he walked. 'Now there's a man who knows how to relax', he said, just to me and the cosmos that we shared, and felt no need to look at me for a reply.

Herzog's book is a tremendous, poetic account of a shattering journey on foot from Munich to Paris towards a friend who may be dead when he arrives. In one direction - towards Lotte Eisner, the friend who lies in hospital - his friendship is so strong it is preposterous; Herzog knows this, and the push of the preposterous seems to keep him going through life (in this book he claims to have swum fifty miles from New Zealand to Australia).

In other directions, though, specifically towards strangers, in my area of interest, Herzog is not a friendly man. He makes few connections with other humans on his trip and perhaps his closest companion is a dog who follows him for many miles - even then 'he didn't want to be seen, and he just trotted behind me in the roadside ditch'. Herzog is no wandering troubadour, singing for his supper: he makes a habit of breaking into empty houses for shelter.

All this rugged alienation makes me feel embarrassed and bourgeois. I want to impose myself on my surrounding rather than react to them; I want to lie down on the bench properly and sleep under my rapidly tinting spectacle lenses: the sun is warming the grey streets, the pink bench and my grey-pink skin, but I fear a tap on the shoulder from a leather glove.

I rescue myself by telling myself that I'm not Herzog: I want to connect with people, I want at least the option of making friends, and I can do this better reclining than lying down.