London

The Ritz is still here, and still gaudy. No grand hotel in London feels quite so complete, if pink; as if it landed like a Tardis on Green Park. There is no real life here, and there shouldn’t be. Each guest travels with their own novella. There are jewels in the window and brides on the stairs. Lady Thatcher died here, in a corner suite. Don’t ask which one. They won’t say, to discourage ghouls, party hacks and perverts. You cannot know if you are sleeping in her bed, and that is not even the oddest thing about the Ritz. The staff, who dress like toy soldiers, are charming in

Londoners have had to learn, more than ever before, to master the art of fielding pity. We’ve been on the receiving end of lots of it this year from people living in the country who care about us, which makes it worse because we’re supposed to be grateful. I’m still smarting from a few recent zingers: ‘I do feel sorry for you, being cooped up in that small house.’ ‘It must be stifling there. We’ve got a nice breeze down here.’ ‘It’s all so lovely and green. Even London must be looking quite green.’ I bat away this pity that comes across as one-upmanship, bleating: ‘It’s been fine, actually’, ‘I

New York I haven’t felt such shirt-dripping, mind-clogging wet heat since Saigon back in 1971. The Bagel is a steam bath, with lots of very ugly people walking around in stages of undress that would once upon a time have embarrassed that famed stripper Lili St Cyr. How strange that very pretty girls do not shed their clothes as soon as the mercury hits triple figures, but less fortunate ones do even if the number is a cool 80. June is my London party month, or used to be before the city was transformed into a prison camp. And what about The Spectator party? I haven’t heard a woid, as

Noble Rot sits in Greek Street, Soho, on the site of the old Gay Hussar, which squatted here from 1953 like a rebuke. Some people loved this Hungarian ‘left-wing’ restaurant, with its terrible food, its library of Labour-themed political biographies, its raging cartoons and fond memories of Harold Wilson. But you can’t eat political biographies — not if you have taste. An attempt to save it by a ‘Goulash Collective’ failed, because the Gay Hussar was a themed restaurant whose theme — a sort of politicised London Dungeon — ran out. In an exquisite metaphor, it closed in 2018, at the height of Jeremy Corbyn’s self-hating — and self-thwarted —

I’m blessed by the fact that I live almost smack-bang in the middle of old London, a pebble’s toe punt from St Paul’s cathedral. Being an aficionado of Charles Dickens and J.B. Priestley, I’ve been able to wander along empty streets and alleys that have been immortalised in such novels as Angel Pavement and Bleak House. When I’m walking around the yards and courts at the back of the Bank of England, I can imagine the nefarious Mr Golspie darting round a corner with an enigmatic grin of triumph on his conniving, pugnacious moosh. Kicking a stone down a street for as long as possible has been a rediscovered pleasure

The Roof Garden is a pale, Nordic-style restaurant at the top of the glorious Pantechnicon in Belgravia — formerly a bazaar — opposite a Waitrose I didn’t know existed. (Waitrose seems too human for Belgravia. Food seems too human for Belgravia.) This thrilling building, which should be a library — it has Doric columns — is instead a collection of restaurants, shops and what I think are called ‘outlets’ (a Japanese café; something called, gnomically, ‘Kiosk’), all celebrating the ‘playful’ intersection — I mean meeting, but marketing jargon is addictive if you are an idiot — between Nordic and Japanese food. It is a wealth mall from hell, then, in

You cannot have cars and dining tables in the same dreamscape: it doesn’t work, unless you think carbon monoxide is a herb, or are wearing full Hazmat, like some teachers. London is in much denial about its air pollution; in the East End child asthmatics are choking. But we must embrace it for a few days more; others have lost more in pandemic than an attachment to the convention that if we dine outside it should be in a flower-filled garden. Perhaps there are enchanted restaurant gardens in London, but I have never found one. I conclude that, outside fiction or aristocracy, they do not exist. Instead, we have modish

‘I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.’ So Augustus is supposed to have said. What would an emperor of London say today? ‘I found the capital a city of bricks and left her a city of rubble’? London bricks are falling down. Across the capital, brick facades are coming off in chunks. Like the Cadbury chocolate Flake, this is the crumbliest, flakiest brickwork. I was all for the new brick city. I’m a brickwork bore. Away with glass, away with steel! Build back better, build back brick. When I saw brick buildings going up in new developments I cheered. I will bang on

The west end of London is still pale and necrotic, but there are points of light. Hatchards the bookseller is open and its memorial to the Duke of Edinburgh is relatively, blissfully, restrained: a portrait in the window, with minimal text for a writer to trip up on his own sycophancy. People are buying whisky on Jermyn Street. The greasy spoon Piggy’s in Air Street survives and if before you merely loitered outside restaurants and ate your food from a bucket you can now sit down, though a strange sort of duck marshal lurks in St James’s Park, and I do not trust him. I do not think he is