They didn’t want to be with 16-year-olds taking ecstasy and being frisked at the door I stopped seeing them. Now I’m seeing them again.”Moomba is also nightlife made politically correct (apart from the vodka and nicotine consumption) Mr Gossett insists he tolerates no drugs. The food is all organic and the decor almost New Age in feel, from recycled materials The wallpaper is hemp Recyled tyres provide the rubber floor. They are on their backsides, talking and flashing their awesome teeth Downstairs, they are eating. It is a restaurant-lounge.Don’t be misled: in New York you can still find the venues to dance your bones silly and, if you choose, retire to the lavatory stalls for sordid sex or drugs But it is a fragmented scene, at best. There is no longer any Studio 54 or Mudd Club, no single place to which everyone is drawn Different crowds in different clubs on different nights. (For whom, one wonders?)This is Moomba, on the lower reaches of Seventh Avenue.

It has the bouncers and the limos outside, but it is not a club in the familiar sense. There is a disc-jockey spinning the records, but no one is jiving, or even jiggling a little. All now have to display a notice saying what they are and when they close.Here is a guide: bars and cafes close around midnight, drinking bars (where Madrilenos go to swig gintonic and cubalibre after dinner) stay open until 2am, discos (ditto with glitterball and louder music) until 3.30am and live shows 5am. Everything closes half an hour later on holidays, eves of holidays and at weekends But all this is theoretical. Often the real closing time is when the police are called and evict shrieking revellers on to the street. That is what started the seven years’ war in the first place.. It is one in the morning in lower Manhattan, and assuredly you are in the right place.

Music, models, men in black; Val Kilmer in black and pink tinted glasses This is beautiful-people New York at its most concentrated. The velvet rope parted for you, and you are moving with the “A-list”

It is the epicentre of Gotham cool Call it club heaven, a nocturnal nirvana The night before, Madonna was here. So were Robert De Niro, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Naomi Campbell.
But something is strange. The open-air summer bar or terraza is not to be confused with a verbena – an open-air drinking session on the eve of saints’ days. But residents living near bar areas want earlier closing, complaining that revellers’ noise violates their right to a night’s sleep. This fuelled other residents’ complaints that youngsters spend their nights drinking calimotxo – a red wine and Coca-Cola mixture bought in all-night shops and swigged frombig plastic bottles in the street, which they then use as a urinal; on a Sunday morning stroll through 18th-century cobbled squares, you may come upon a stinking, plastic-strewn scene reminiscent of an abandoned refugee camp.Locals are now grappling with the complex distinctions between bars (which also serve food), cafes (which sell drinks) and drinking bars (drinks only) and, in further sub-divisions, between discotheques, dance halls and salas de espectaculos, or live shows.

But the Philip Morris HQ is just about the last skyscraper left in Manhattan where you don’t have to go down to the pavement outside to light up.. It has been seven years of warfare between bar owners who want to stay open longer and Madrid residents who want the Spanish capital’s generous and oft-violated licensing hours cut. This bitter trial of strength has ended with a decision by the authorities to, er, leave things as they are. The announcement on Friday amounts to a climbdown by conservative politicians, who have been trying for years to curb the excesses developed during the euphoric Eighties, when Madrid’smovida – a hectic scene epitomised by the hedonistic film director Pedro Almodovar – was the envy of young Europe. She declined, saying her garden was just as pleasing as their neurotically manicured lawns.But Judge James Tormey of the state supreme court said Ms Kennedy had failed to show that her constitutional rights were being abridged.

What’s more, he ruled after an inspection that her property was ugly. How did he know? Judge Tormey drew on the precedent set by Justice Potter Stewart of the US Supreme Court, who, called upon to define pornography, said: “I know it when I see it.”Dirty businessThe divide between smoking and non-smoking sections in aircraft can seem pretty academic to clean-air addicts who find themselves in the row in front of the weed fiends, but things could be worse: on the local JAT airline, a recent visitor to Belgrade tells me, they have smokers on the left of the plane, choking non-smokers all the way down the right.In large chunks of the world, of course, smoking sections are on the way out – something which worries the Philip Morris tobacco combine, allegedly. The next millennium, perhaps.Green in judgmentOnly in America, Part 93: a judge in New York state, has ruled that ordering a woman to mow her lawn is not a violation of her First Amendment right to freedom of expression.Bourke Kennedy, an environmentalist, has been at odds with neighbours over her free-range lawn, which they insist should be cut twice a month in accordance with a local by-law. One employee told us that company rules oblige all execs to book smoking seats when they travel, whether or not they smoke “Complete nonsense,” was the company’s official comment. And this was Japan, where they insist on disposable chopsticks made from non-renewable hardwoods. One shudders, too, to think how many more forests were felled to produce the 6,000 different kinds of documents, enough to fill a suitcase for each participant.