London

The clipped voice on the old television newsreel tells us that November 27, 1958 was a gray old London day. The Queen, accompanied by Vice President Richard Nixon, was dedicating and opening the American Memorial Chapel at the far east end of the City of London’s great cathedral. Ordinary men and women from all over Britain paid for the chapel by public subscription. It was the least we could do. It was a miracle that the cathedral had survived the Nazi Blitz almost intact. One part of the cathedral was hit by a bomb in October 1940, and it was on that site that eighteen years later the Memorial Chapel was built. The Chapel is dedicated to the 28,000 American people who were stationed on British soil and died in World War Two, many of them on D-Day.

‘Nobody wants to admit it, but London was boring even before the pandemic — and it’s still boring now!’ I said. We were at a London drinks party. The guy retaliated with a smirk and that old Dr Johnson line, ‘He who is tired of London, is tired of life.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not tired of life — I’m tired of people who always quote Dr Johnson when you make some slightly disparaging remark about London!’ I dislike that Dr Johnson quote because it assumes that you can’t be genuinely tired of London; your discontent must be due to your own boring, miserable life and not because London has become an overpriced, culturally exhausted and soulless city — which it has.

When I was 16 I told my father I wanted to leave America to go to university in Scotland. His only real concern was the food: ‘I don’t think you know what you’re getting into.’ His run-in with British cuisine was in the 1970s, so little wonder. Sure enough, the food in the student halls of St Andrews was worthy of Oliver Twist. If it wasn’t slabs of fatty gammon, already cold in the tray, it was a tepid, oozing excuse for lasagna, harboring hard lumps of ground beef and grainy béchamel sauce. And then there’s haggis. I loved everything about my four years at the tiny university town on the frigid North Sea coast, except for the food. That all changed when I moved to London, and I have to hand it to them — Londoners do know how to eat well. The world’s cuisine is here.

You may have noticed the Connaught Hotel a little more since 2011, when ‘Silence’, the steamy fountain by Japanese ‘architect philosopher’ Tadao Ando, was installed outside the entrance. But actually the hotel doesn’t want to be noticed. It prides itself on guaranteeing famous guests their privacy. Eric Clapton added his own layer of protection by checking in as ‘Mr W.B. Albion’ (he’s a fan of the soccer club West Bromwich Albion). Alec Guinness valued its discretion, and was annoyed when Jack Nicholson’s stay during the filming of Batman attracted the paparazzi. The hotel in turn had its own issues with Jack and his entourage. As the star put it to a friend: ‘They have a shit fit every time we walk through the lobby with jeans on.