London
London is in drought: it says so on the side of the buses. When I left Australia, the dams were overflowing. It’s an upside-down world indeed. It’s mid-April and the days are cold and bright, as George Orwell recorded them. But, reassuringly, only the digital clocks strike 13.

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It’s my first visit to the English capital for a decade, so this may be old news, but the streets are teeming with Russians, or at least people who sound like Russians. They can’t all be West End thespians hoping to be cast as the next Bond villain, so I suppose most are representatives of the Novyi Russkiy one reads about in the Financial Times.

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This pinkish question takes me back to the cab ride to Sydney airport. I suspect the driver hails from the old Soviet state, but he informs me, vigorously, that he is Polish. Wishing to mollify, I inquire if he spends much time in the local Polish community. He replies with some ferocity: ‘If I wanted to hang out with Poles, I’d go to f**king Poland, where there are 40 million of the…’ — and here he uses an imaginative adjective-noun combination that I doubt even a liberal journal such as The Spectator Australia would wish to print.

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There is no doubting the nationality, nor the Novyi Russkiy-ness (exhibit one: a pet wolf named Boris) of Evgeny Lebedev, proprietor of the Evening Standard and the Independent, who fronted the Leveson inquiry into the British media. Sporting a Tsarist beard, Lebedev came armed with copies of Oscar Wilde’s Reading Gaol love letter, ‘De Profundis’, and John Milton’s anti-censorship tract, ‘Areopagitica’. He didn’t get to quote from either, which was Leveson’s loss: I would have paid at least as much as Evgeny’s papa, Alexander, stumped up for the newspapers (£1) to hear him reading from the Wilde. This bit, perhaps: ‘The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are.’

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Speaking of Oscar — and jumping forward a few days via the wonderful Eurostar — a Paris highlight is lunch at L’Hôtel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the establishment where the broken writer spent his final days (it was the Hôtel d’Alsace then). The dining room is lavish, the service impeccable and the fare — well, the two young women at the next table take photographs of each course, for uploading to social media sites I presume. I have a feeling I’ve heard of other people taking snapshots of their food before eating it, and then I remember who they are: cannibalistic serial killers. The other disturbing note is the background music: Oasis and Blur. As Wilde might have said, either those British boybands go or I do. Or maybe he wouldn’t have…

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The great thing about Paris is that it’s Paris. It’s also the last place on the planet where journalists are treated with respect. At museums and galleries, one flashes one’s press card and not only gets in for free, but is moved to the head of the line. I know this is an indelicate thing for an Australian to say, but I love queue-jumping. At the Musée National Eugène Delacroix, housed in the painter’s former apartment and studio, the man on the door greets said press card with a cry of ‘Parfait!’ and, if I’m not mistaken, a small bow.

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In London, I try the press card at Tate Modern and receive such a hostile response that I fear the rozzers will be called to haul me before Lord Justice Leveson. I’m let off with a warning and after some mandatory queue detention I’m allowed into the Damien Hirst exhibition. Still miffed, I mention to an uninterested stranger than Hirst would be no one if not for the Australian who caught the sharks frozen in formaldehyde in the artist’s best-known work, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’. (It’s sharks plural because the first one, which debuted in 1991, had to be replaced after it went off). I can find no mention of Vic Hislop in the program. The stranger looks at me as if I’m weird, when she’s the one inspecting the large intestine of a bisected calf. A girl, aged seven, lightens the mood when she asks her father: ‘Dad, will they have postcards of this?’ You bet they will, sweetheart.

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Lunch at Dr Johnson’s watering hole, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. Around the corner, where Johnson lived, is a statue of his cat, Hodge, the one who ‘shan’t be shot’. In the Times, there’s a photo of King Juan Carlos of Spain, posing with an elephant he’s just bagged in Botswana. Searching for words to respond to this, the best I can come up with is: ‘What a prick’. So I quote Dr J instead: ‘It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.’

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April 23 is St George’s Day and the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death (and Wordsworth’s and Rupert Brooke’s; clearly a day for poets to tread warily). I have a pre-noon pint at the Duke of Wellington on Portobello Road, which seems to cover the bases. Then it’s off to the races at Royal Windsor, where the flat-capped man at the gate makes my day by waving me in with a ‘Right you are, guv’nor.’

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I meet Hilary Mantel at the Tower of London, to interview her for the Weekend Australian Magazine. She is gracious and charming and warmly intelligent. Her new book, Bring up the Bodies, a sequel to the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, is an absolute cracker. I wonder how she will live without the charming, lethal man who obsesses her: Thomas Cromwell. History being history, in the next book, The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell has to lose his head, the dome from which Mantel has scrutinised the world these past several years, and found it wanting.  

Stephen Romei is literary editor of the Australian.