Tanya Gold

Ave Mario looks like Clown Town, a soft-play centre in Finchley with a ball pit so large you could drown in it and lie undiscovered for years. Apart from the crucifixes on the walls, of course, which are specific to Avo Maria. (I have yet to find a soft-play centre that looks like St Peter’s.) We need joy now that Al ‘Boris’ Johnson, our human ball pit masquerading as someone who does not have narcissistic personality disorder, endures to fudge another day with his cabinet of ghouls and his stupid hair. I have always underestimated him as a hack: no more. Now I think he could edit the Daily Mail, and I have no higher praise for any hustler who ever learned to write his name than that.

I went to a garden party at Buckingham Palace once. It is coloured in my memory like childhood. There are good Canalettos and fitted carpets inside because that is self-confidence. In the garden the Queen stood with diplomats, safe from confessions, tears and requests for football tickets. (People do this. They write to her for FA Cup Final tickets. They think she is a witch.) She looks like a benevolent sweet from afar, but I am fond of the Queen of my ideation since she replied to my son’s birthday greeting with a very civil letter which he lost.

I should know better than to visit restaurants assembled as if from disparate bricks, like thrift-shop Duplo: but the ever-credulous person sees the world anew each day. I thought Arcade, a glass restaurant on New Oxford Street, which somehow manages to be worse than old Oxford Street, might have some of the drama of the arcade of my dreams. I thought it might be eerie, even arcane. Names are important. This one lied. It is new, of course. This piece of the city, once Gin Lane, seems guiltier than most parts of London – it gives even Mitre Square a race in spectral squalor – and so is constantly building, tearing and rebuilding, in some appalling yet righteous act of civic self-hatred.

A few years ago, I moved to Newlyn, a fishing village in west Cornwall. I didn’t understand why I moved to Newlyn until I returned to Venice. I take almost all my holidays in Venice, and it is a cliché that Venice only slowly reveals her mysteries. You must fight your way past a mass of Renaissance portraiture and mirrored palaces but the mystery it showed me this time is this: like Newlyn, Venice is a fishing village. Venice got rich in the thirteenth century, monopolized the trade routes to the east for two centuries and covered itself in Istrian stone, which Newlyn didn’t. But it’s still a fishing village, founded by people running away from barbarians, into the mud flats of a lagoon to fish for crabs. It is easy to forget that — unless you look for Venetian cuisine.

Cornwall has a boast this week and it has nothing to do with ice-cream or tides: we have made more than 2000 offers to house Ukrainian refugees. I am not surprised. The duchy is filled with second homes, and they are very often empty. Harboursides are dark in winter and the old town in St Ives is no more than a monied ghetto now. Cornwall is now more of a business than a place, with an owner and a servant class Since the war began it is often said that it is easier to offer refuge to those closest to you. The Polish don’t want Syrians, for instance, but they want Ukrainians. In Cornwall the opposite is true.

I’m not sure how a family of Warsaw bakers – my own – ended up in the northeast of England, specifically Sunderland, in England in the 1860s. The family myth – and it is a myth, because we have absolutely no evidence for it – is that they planned to take ship for America, but were dropped off in Sunderland, having been assured it was New York City. Perhaps it was a foggy day. And if it wasn’t, how would they know it wasn’t New York City? This myth is powerful though. Growing up in Surrey, as I did, will do that to you. Dreaming of other lives is narcotic.

As beautiful as Bath is, it is more interesting underground. This is where the ruins, the gods, and the waters are: the steps to the temple of Sulis Minerva near the Pump Room, the Victorian tunnels, and, in the eerie plant room below the Gainsborough Bath Spa Hotel, the water from the ancient springs, waiting to be purified before it flows into the Gainsborough’s private baths. The three springs of Bath – The Cross, the Hetling and the King’s – formed when rainwater fell on the hills 10,000 years ago, descended 2500 metres and rose through the limestone to the city. They produce one million litres a day, at a temperature of 45-46 degrees, and are filled with minerals: sodium; calcium; sulphate; chloride; magnesium; iron.

2030 is the deadline: the end of petrol cars in Britain. Because nothing lasts forever. 'This may be the last petrol car that I design,' said a British marque designer, sketching lines on a napkin wistfully. I threw the napkin in a trunk in the attic for memorial. I have become addicted to petrol cars in these last years because they are so conventionally masculine: driving them feels like theft, and it is mind-altering. If you don’t agree, drive an Aston Martin DB11 round a small bend. It will change you. I could write about the unspoken, unconscious joy of polluting – if you trash a planet it won’t forget you – but, like me, you are probably here for the car. So, electric. So far, I have only driven a Tesla model X.