Needed: £100,000 to live in London

Last week's announcement that Manhattan property prices have risen by 42 per cent since the beginning of the year offered little comfort to cash-strapped Londoners. With the exception of property, life on this side of the Pond is still a good deal more expensive. Frank Sinatra was right when he sang "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere", but these days that applies to London, not New York.

I recently returned to London after living in Manhattan for five years and when New Yorkers ask me how I'm getting on, my standard response is: "It's like moving to the outer boroughs except everything's twice as expensive." OK, that's a slight exaggeration, but even a sober-minded body like the Economist Intelligence Unit estimates the cost of living in London is seven per cent higher than in New York. When it comes to restaurant bills, prices are almost identical - provided you substitute pounds for dollars.

This also applies to taxi fares, drinks and clothes, which, along with eating out, are my main sources of expenditure. Consequently, I'm going to have to earn considerably more in London to maintain the lifestyle I was enjoying in New York. Since I'm earning considerably less, my standard of living has declined precipitously.

For instance, in Manhattan I never bothered to cook for myself. Take-away food was so inexpensive - and so good - I could afford to have sushi delivered five nights a week. In London, by contrast, I have yet to find a Japanese restaurant that will deliver to my flat in Shepherd's Bush. If I want sushi I have to dip into my life savings and make a pilgrimage to Nobu on Park Lane. It's not just a financial issue. One of the hardest things to get used to in London is the amount of time it takes to get from A to B. Admittedly, this is partly because Manhattan is a good deal smaller. It feels like a quaint Cotswold village next to our sprawling megalopolis.

London is more like Los Angeles, without the sunshine. But the main reason it's easier to get from A to B in New York is because the public transport is so much better.

If I was Ken Livingstone I'd stop tinkering with London Transport and simply head hunt the organisational geniuses who run New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority. For a flat fare of £1 you can get from Wall Street to the Upper East Side in about 15 minutes. The equivalent trip in London, from the City to Fulham, takes the best part of an hour and costs almost twice as much. If anything like the Northern Line existed in New York, Mayor Giuliani would be hunted down like an animal and sentenced to 20 years hard labour in Sing Sing.

Of course, compared to driving in London, the London Underground is a royal motorcade. I recently made the mistake of buying a car. After paying 15 per cent more for it than it would have cost on the Continent, I then had to pay an additional £840 to insure it. That was the cheapest quote I could get for an annual, fully comprehensive policy - and the car in question is a Skoda.

The final piece of the puzzle was a resident's parking permit. I left my flat in west London at 11.30am to drive to Fulham Town Hall to get a permit and didn't get home again until 3.20pm. This wasn't due to the limited engine capacity of my Skoda, either. It's not an exaggeration to say I could have walked from one side of Manhattan to the other in the time it took me to drive round Shepherd's Bush Green. I suppose I should look on the bright side. At least it was 3.20pm the same day. What with the time it takes to get anywhere in London - and the vast expense of doing anything once you've got there - I very rarely leave my flat. If I spent as much time watching television by myself in New York as I do in London, I'd be labelled a "shut in" and my friends would stage an intervention to force me to get help. Over here, I don't really have any friends - at least not ones I see in person. For all the time you spend with your friends in present-day London, living in the city is no different from living in an isolated farmhouse in the Orkneys.

Don't get me wrong. London still has many advantages over New York.

There are the beautifully kept parks, the world-class galleries and the peerless street markets. Striding down the Mall on a gorgeous summer's day, with Admiralty Arch at one end and Buckingham Palace at the other, I still think - in the words of Mayor Giuliani - "our city can kick your city's ass".

But as soon as I get in a black cab I come crashing down to earth. The amount showing on the meter at the start of the journey is higher than most New York cab fares at the end, and when I finally arrive back in Shepherd's Bush - four hours later - I have to cash a Premium Bond to settle the bill.

So what's the answer? One solution would be to earn more money. But just how big a salary do you need in order to enjoy a decent lifestyle in contemporary London? Fifteen years ago, Lord Gowrie shocked the nation when he announced that he was resigning as arts minister because he couldn't afford to live in central London on a ministerial salary of £33,000. Today, that would scarcely be considered enough. When the body of John Morgan, the style editor of GQ, was found on the steps beneath his attic rooms at Albany recently, his friends speculated that he may have been depressed over the poor state of his finances. Yet he was earning at least twice Gowrie's 1985 wages.

By my reckoning, in order to be able to live in a nice part of town, enjoy a good social life and have sushi delivered five nights a week, I'd need to be earning a minimum of £100,000. Since that's never going to happen, I might take the easy way out - and move back to New York.