London

The Park is the new restaurant from Jeremy King, and it sits in a golden building to the north of Hyde Park, just off Queensway. This is an interesting district compared with Knightsbridge – it is still capable of reality – but isn’t every-where interesting compared with Knightsbridge? The Park is Art Deco of course: the presiding aesthetic of familiarity, snatched joy and inevitable doom. It looks like an exquisitely appointed cruise ship of the mid-20th century King is a specialist in grand cafés. He opened the Wolseley in Piccadilly and the Delaunay on the Aldwych, though he lost them to his feckless backers in 2022, and has begun again with Arlington by the Ritz, Simpson’s on the Strand, pending, and this. Queensway has a grand café now, and I am pleased for it.

One winter’s night before the Ukraine war, I was on a train that stopped at a remote station deep in the Russian arctic. It was late November. The mercury stood at 15 degrees below zero – the hard, dry frost of the far north. The train stood silent, wreathed in the coal smoke of the stoves that heated every carriage. The village’s name was Kharp. Though I did not know it at the time, Kharp is home to the FKU IK-3 penal colony, a Soviet-era arctic facility known as Polar Wolf where Alexei Navalny has just died. It was here that the Putin regime, with its rigid deafness to irony, chose to imprison Navalny for his final agony I wanted to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights, so I pulled on a couple of coats and headed outside.

‘My grandchildren are my world,’ writes a woman on social media, summing up a certain type of grandparent. There are, however, two ways of looking at it and I see many whose worlds revolve around their grandchildren because they have no choice. I used to chat with them at the school gate. If their families were not strictly ‘the rural poor’, they were certainly of the group Theresa May described as ‘just about managing’: both parents had to work and grandparents took up the slack, unless they were still of working age, in which case arrangements were more haphazard. I see many whose worlds revolve around their grandchildren because they have no choice Because I had my last child late, I was as old as some school-gate grandmothers who had become parents when very young.

One in, one out, as Rick says in Casablanca. Le Gavroche, which was the first restaurant in Britain to win three Michelin stars – and this was before Michelin stars indicated poor mental health in gifted chefs – closes in January, which is serious news in the land of London restaurants: a kind of Congress of Vienna with Michel Roux bowing out with the blood of infinite chickens on his knife. I don’t love Le Gavroche the way other critics do but I admire it, even if it means ‘urchin’, which is not witty when you consider its prices. There was a scandal involving staff’s tips going to management – an ongoing obscenity, though this one was resolved – and I also think that if you desire French food you could just go to France. It’s not far, at least in miles.

To help out friends, I sometimes collect a boy from his primary school near Sloane Square. This part of London boasts the most expensive homes in Britain and the local families are served by a crop of ultra-pricey schools. The best known, Hill House, was founded in the 1940s by an eccentric army officer, ‘the Colonel’, who replaced the traditional blazers, caps and ties with a uniform of soft shoes, breeches and cravats inspired by George Mallory’s climbing kit. The Colonel’s wife chose the colours – red, brown and saffron – and the pupils became a local landmark as they marched along the King’s Road to play games at the Duke of York’s parade ground. Their red breeches suggested a nickname, ‘the Rusty Blobs’. King Charles was a Rusty Blob.

Rome I have spent almost all my adult life as a foreigner. When I graduated from Oxford I faced a stark choice: work for a living or leave the country. As I did not wish ever to have to get up in the morning, toil in an office or travel on public transport, the path was clear. I moved to Budapest with the intention of opening a bar. I feature in three novels as, respectively, a poseur, a snob and a persistent but inept seducer It was the summer of 1993, and the newly free nations of central Europe had become an irresistible magnet for self-styled bohemians from across the western world. Budapest was cheap. It was fun. My Hungarian friends were furiously hedonistic, manic-depressive, wildly ambitious and creative.

I used to be a terrible grump who would rant and rage against the 1,001 irritations of modern British life. And then one day I decided life was too short to be permanently enraged by everything and everyone.  ‘These kind people simply want to share their music with me! How thoughtful!’ For grumpy me, the sound of other people’s music in public spaces was agony. I’d seethe at the outrageous selfishness of such people. My quiet walks through the park would be shattered by the BOOM-BOOM-BOOM blast of music from a passing cyclist. And I’d shout: ‘Thanks for sharing your terrible taste in music!’   The new, cool me reacted differently. ‘These kind people simply want to share their music with me! How thoughtful!