I was trying to buy a coat and some earmuffs - it's minus 10 million degrees out here and like an idiot I arrived woefully unprepared - when the block kicked in. It's pretty embarrassing when a shop assistant hands your card back, smiles weakly and says it's been rejected. If you're like me, you ask them to try again, and they reluctantly do so while a queue builds up behind you. And if you're really like me, the card's rejected again, this time in front of an impatient crowd, so to save face you apologetically huff something about "calling your bank to bollock them" and demonstratively whip out your mobile, only to discover you can't get a signal until you walk all the way out of the shop, which makes you look precisely like you're trying to sneak away.

Standing on the pavement, with the phone almost fused to my ear with the cold, I'm told I won't be able to withdraw any money until tomorrow, because it's night-time in England and the Halifax security team have all gone home. Still, it's thoughtful of them to employ someone to sit at the end of the phone 24 hours a day just to empathise.

Since I have only $22 on me, my options for New York fun are suddenly extremely limited: specifically, they're limited to returning to the hotel to sit indoors ordering room service. I'm under house arrest.

Still, at least there's a TV. I sigh and switch it on, immediately plunging headlong into a high-octane showbiz news atrocity called The Insider. It's like being hit in the face with a pan. The hosts simultaneously smile and shout, and it's edited so quickly you feel like you're glimpsing events through the side window of a speeding car. The big news is that Lindsay Lohan was spotted swigging champagne from a bottle on New Year's Eve. They have a two-second clip of this which they loop and repeat about 600 times, sometimes zooming in, sometimes zooming out, sometimes accompanying it with spinning CGI lettering and sparkles and whoosh noises. Then a man with more teeth than sense whooshes in to replace her, loudly pledging to bring us "all the latest Lohan updates on this developing story" throughout the remainder of the show. Then he's replaced by an advert for an anti-constipation pill.

I look out of the window. Outside, New York sparkles and bustles. But without a coat, I can barely even step out of the door. I grit my teeth and return to the box.

Time passes. The all-new celebrity edition of the US version of The Apprentice begins. It's fronted by Donald Trump and his optical-illusion hairstyle, who's rubbish compared with Alan Sugar. Among the cast is simpering human perineum Piers Morgan, furthering his showbiz career with another deliberately smug turn. Half the others are unrecognisable to me, partly because they're American celebs, partly because they've had a bit too much plastic surgery, which always gives people a strangely generic, faintly cro-magnon look, as though they're part of a new species descended from, but not directly related to, us regular human beings. Morgan is sneering at one of them when my attention is drawn to a ticker-tape scrolling across the bottom of the screen announcing that Barack Obama has won the Iowa caucus. Then the whole thing's replaced by an advert for lasagna rollatini with sausage, something that looks so utterly ghastly that even Iceland wouldn't consider it.

At some point I fall asleep, only to wake up a few hours later midway through a speech by Mike Huckabee, the Republican candidate who's also won in Iowa. He's worrying for several reasons: 1) he's an ultra-religious Baptist minister who doesn't believe in evolution, 2) he looks a bit like Charles Logan, the corrupt president from Season 5 of 24, and 3) he's quoting GK Chesterton: "A true soldier fights not because he hates those who are in front of him, but because he loves those who are behind him." Standing directly behind him as he says this: Chuck Norris. Then there's a commercial for Advil. New York, meanwhile, continues to twinkle through the window, infuriatingly out-of-reach.

By now I'm out of my mind with despair, so I call the bank again simply to vent some frustration, and end up being horrible to the man on the other end, who's only doing his job. This makes me feel so low that I call back a few minutes later to try to apologise, but get put through to someone else, and they just think I'm weird.

Now it's the next morning and I'm still waiting to discover if the bank's going to let me go outside. I've learned my lesson, OK? It's protecting my money by stopping me getting my hands on it, just in case I'm not me. And right now I'm not me. The real me would be out seeing the sights. Muggins me is locked indoors drinking Pepsi for entertainment. I clearly deserve everything I get.

· This week Charlie successfully avoided celebrating new year. He narrowly avoided deep vein thrombosis and norovirus: "To an emetophobe - a person who is terrified of vomiting - it's a fate considerably worse than death."