London

For three months after I move to the country, I am told, I am going to be in the most almighty panic. I will ask myself repeatedly what on earth I have done. I will have sleepless nights worrying that I should never have left London. I will wake in a sweat in the early hours gripped by the idea that I cannot possibly survive now I am not ten minutes’ walk from the Northcote Road. And then, magically, one day, about three months in, I will wake up in my country cottage and look out of my bedroom window at the sea of green and say, ‘This is the best decision I have ever made.’ I’m really glad a few friends who have done this move have talked me through it, because I panic at the best of times.

I was not on the winning side of the debate, despite giving it the old college try. Thank god for my South African friend Simon Reader, who coached me just before I went on. Mind you, my side felt a bit like Maxime Weygand, the French general who, in June 1940, was happily smoking his pipe back in Syria when he got the call to take over the French army. The Germans had already taken Holland and Belgium and had breached la Ligne Maginot, Gamelin had thrown in the towel, and Paul Reynaud had called for a fresh face to stop the mighty Wehrmacht. ‘Gee, thanks a bunch,’ said Weygand, but took it like a real Frenchman and surrendered to the German army a couple of weeks later.

On Tower Hill, by the east wall of Beauchamp Tower where Robert Dudley was imprisoned for a year, a raven called Merlin hides behind a yucca plant. I know she’s there because the Ravenmaster told me. He knows she’s there because Merlin (a female) and he are bonded and they keep tabs on each other throughout the day. As he walks across Tower Green, he whistles to her, and in reply, from the shadows, comes a low, metallic, caw. Ravens pair up for life, for the most part, and Merlin, who dislikes the other ravens, has chosen Chris, the Tower of London’s Yeoman Warder Ravenmaster, as her mate. As he draws near, a beak protrudes slowly from behind the yucca.

Daphne’s serves Italian food in South Kensington. (I like the name because Daphne was the name Jack Lemmon chose for his female self in Some Like It Hot, although Tony Curtis — Josephine — wanted to call him Geraldine. I know no one else called Daphne, and I do not need to. Lemmon sated me.) This district, you may recall, is currently a building site, as residents try to dream their houses bigger and their noses smaller; it is a tangle of cranes, personal trainers, tax avoidance, lipstick, adultery and Ferraris swamped with parking tickets. And so Daphne’s, which was a 1980s mini-series restaurant wrought from assorted Nigel Dempster columns and Judith Krantz novels, recently restored, now has the soothing grace of a National Trust interior.

I hate gentrification; my area was so much cooler when there were people openly selling drugs on the high street, my neighbours' house had a mattress outside and the nice restaurants needed bouncers so the diners weren't constantly harassed by crack addicts. Now it's all just nice coffee shops, other broadsheet readers and arthouse cinemas. But don't worry, for the Mayor of London is on the case, launching an inquiry into how much London land is being bought up by overseas investors and, as the Guardian reports, 'the scale of gentrification and rising housing costs in the capital'.

I hoped that Bronte would be filled with Victorian writers licking ink off their fingers and bitching about Mrs Gaskell being a third-rate hack; but it is not to be. (Do not think I am vulgar. My description is accurate. Wuthering Heights is a rude novel, and Jane Eyre is worse. St John Rivers, its Christian Grey, is surely a Spectator subscriber). It is, instead, a finely wrought and glossy restaurant off Trafalgar Square, designed, I suspect, for advertising executives. It used to be the Strand Dining Rooms but it died and now there’s this. It is named for Horatio Nelson, the Duke of Bronte. His title, it is believed, was borrowed by Patrick Brunty, the Irish blacksmith’s apprentice who educated himself and came to England to father a literary dynasty by mistake.