London

Claridge’s grew nine storeys in the last decade: it’s a metaphor. The ornamental 1897 castle on Brook Street has expanded to fit the available space. Though it grew by half, it never closed, and workmen dug out the basement by hand. In one room, Claridge’s was a building site: in another, a dream world. We are trekking through metaphors now. We are up to our necks. The children eating the Nutella, banana and whipped cream crêpes look deranged Hotels are like buses: they have infinite possibilities. That is what they are for. To not be home. Like Alec Guinness, who lived in the Connaught with his share of the profits of Star Wars, which shamed him (the Connaught is the anti-Tatooine), I would like to live in a hotel.

Simpson’s in the Strand is a dream palace, and its fortunes are as tidal as the river. It is on the site of John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, destroyed in the Peasants’ Revolt. It began as a cigar divan and chess club, was subsumed into the Savoy Hotel, built with the profits from The Mikado, and was beloved by Churchill and Wodehouse, who described it as an Elysium where you were ‘at liberty to eat till you were helpless, if you felt so disposed’. It then decayed. I’ve come here for 30 years and, grand as it was, Simpson’s smelt of beef and the 1922 committee by the end. No restaurant can live on that indefinitely, and it closed in 2020. I did not enjoy my last meal here, but I took part of its myth: when it sold off its crockery in 2023 I bought what I think is a milk jug.

Mezzogiorno is a very serious, golden Italian restaurant inside the Corinthia London Hotel on Northumberland Avenue. Restaurants are increasingly gold these days, as if for a crocodile of Scrooge McDucks trooping through the wreckage of liberalism looking for money, nuts and guns. It follows the trajectory of my beloved Raffles at the OWO [Old War Office] round the corner. What was once a Ministry of Defence building – though formerly a hotel – is now a (quite good) pizza joint. When the time comes, I hope the drones know. Ignore the lie that gold restaurants serve tiny portions for tiny people. These are vast Mezzogiorno is by the gifted Francesco Mazzei, previously of Sartoria in Savile Row. Here, because this is an age in denial about hierarchy– ha!

Dover Street Counter is the tiny sister of The Dover, a very good restaurant on – who knew? – Dover Street, Mayfair. This is the site of P.G. Wodehouse’s fictional Drones Club, if following Wodehouse’s paths is your way of coping, and there is nothing wrong with that. There are some bad restaurants in Mayfair now, with slutty Roman gods and monumental Caesar salads; passive-aggressive tributes to Elizabeth II in bad cake, and enslaved fish staring at sex workers with the mute anguish of recognition. This is better. Good restaurants have the gift of suppressing fear, and this is one such The Dover is delivered by professionals for adults – that is, people who do not put intimacy on expenses, and who can recognise neo-Stalinist soft furnishings when they see them.

"Do you know who I am?" said the voice belonging to the lady who used to be my mother, crossly, at the end of the phone line. The truthful answer is no. Since the dementia took hold, a hostile stranger who doesn’t think much of me inhabits my mother’s mind and body. A hostile stranger who doesn’t think much of me inhabits my mother’s mind and body No matter what I do, no matter how many times I ring or visit her, this person who used to be my mother is always cross and disappointed. "Oh, you’re alive are you!" the strange voice barks, before asking me what I’m up to, with a sarcastic edge. Whatever I tell her I’m doing, even if I say I’m lying down with a headache, she snaps back: "That’s nice for you. You enjoy!

Corenucopia by Clare Smyth is in Belgravia, amid a line of interior-design shops, and it is prettier than all of them. It is a female paradise on the ground floor of a mansion block, dedicated to art nouveau and ‘comfort’ food. There are plaster tree branches peeking from the walls and the menu script looks elvish. It is rare that whimsy does not make me kick things, and few things are more whimsical than plaster forests, but Smyth, also of the three-Michelin-starred Core, is one of the great cooks working now. From her, whimsy is merely voice; or, rather, I forgive her. We eat malted sourdough with Ampersand butter and wild venison salami. Both are glorious There is a sanity to this restaurant, even if it is gilded for native Belgravia blondes.

The exterior of the Phoenix Palace is cream with golden letters like the napkin and the Laffer curve, and it is squeezed below an Art Deco mansion block in Baker Street. The street is self-effacing, stuck between the Marylebone Road and the Sherlock Holmes museum, which exists because London is, among other things, morbid. The cuisine is Cantonese. Understatement is a feint here, though; the Phoenix Palace is famous, and always on the best dim sum lists. It is beloved by Chinese tourists and students, and, weirdly, the Labour party, whose grandees smile uneasily from photographs, like hostages to the economy, and rice. The food comes near instantly.

There are two great American bars in London. One is perfect to escape the winter chill, the other to embrace summer sun. In winter, the American Bar at the Savoy – London’s oldest surviving cocktail bar – is ideal. There is a reason why this warm and welcoming spot has courted popularity for so long and is considered the spiritual home of modern mixology, at least in this country. In the summer months, head for the American Bar at the Stafford. There you can enjoy the large terrace just a stone’s throw from St James’s Street, where similarly skilled bar staff are able to mix up pretty much anything one desires. You know you’re in a great American bar when the bartenders are able to sling together on-menu or off-menu mixes while maintaining good conversation.

The dog café had a pretty pink sign describing its many services and I stood outside it mesmerised as I realised what it was. This was not a café where dogs were allowed. This was a café for dogs. I peeked inside and there were dog baskets for the customers to lounge in as they drank their puppuccinos. There are so many things about Britain that are too subtle for me when I re-enter the atmosphere as an expat My friend and I were on our way to dinner on the Fulham Road and we ended up standing by this café as I stared with my mouth open and asked her repeatedly how this could be. There are so many things about Britain that are too subtle for me now when I re-enter the atmosphere as an expat.