The residents of Mayfair are misnamed: they do not really live here. They live in Mayfair like I live on the A30 roundabout near Morrisons or in dreamland. I am sometimes on the A30 roundabout near Morrisons and sometimes in dreamland but only -sporadically. It would be ludicrous to suggest that either is my permanent address, even if pretending it means that the people I stole my money from can’t steal it back.
Mayfair is a district with an itinerant population and when they are here, tidally like plastic, they dine conservatively, almost fearfully, in a series of restaurants so generic and dispiriting that they either righteously hate themselves, righteously fear us, or have — as anyone who’s ever been to a yacht show will know — absolutely no taste. Perhaps all are true, but in Mayfair nowadays I feel I am reporting not on a gaudy and once-interesting part of the city but on an ice floe fretted with bricks and bad art, floating away to the sea of rotting souls.
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