If you’re a traveler at heart, it’s likely you’ll stumble on a place that grabs you and holds you so insistently you’ll never want to leave. That place for me is London, where I first rented a flat in the days when the Clash was the Only Band That Mattered, and thugs made it dangerous to attend a soccer match. I thought of the trip as my reward for finally publishing a book after years of hard work. There was no guarantee I’d publish another one, so it seemed wise to step back from my ordinary life and appreciate the moment while it lasted.
I knew nothing about London, really, or only a little beyond its literary history. I’d visited it once as a college student and behaved exactly as I did on campus, drinking beer at tourist pubs like Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, Samuel Johnson’s local, rather than the Colgate Inn. I avoided Buckingham Palace as well as every aspect of high culture, an oversight I hoped to correct now that I was officially a writer, more grown up and evolved, so it pains me to admit that I led my wife to a pub off Charlotte Street right after we arrived.
This wasn’t mere frivolity. I was cold, and my wife was much, much colder. The pied-à-terre I’d rented for a short stay lacked central heating, relying on an antique storage heater that needed twenty-four hours or so to warm up before it generated a single British Thermal Unit. The owner hadn’t warned me, of course, but why would he? Nobody would’ve rented the flat if they knew. My wife wasn’t happy to be wearing gloves and a knit cap indoors, but I assured her mistakenly, as it turned out, that it wouldn’t happen again.
