Diary

Christopher Caldwell

Wednesday, 6th May 2009

My room was not ready when I arrived, underslept after a flight from Washington, at the hotel near Shaftesbury Avenue where I’m going to spend the next few days.

My room was not ready when I arrived, underslept after a flight from Washington, at the hotel near Shaftesbury Avenue where I’m going to spend the next few days. So I had a cup of coffee in the lounge. When I came back a very pretty woman was talking to the receptionist. She looked up at me and, to my shock, I knew her. And not just knew her. Although I hadn’t seen her in years, I was sure I knew her very well — maybe even well enough that it would be a faux pas if I couldn’t figure out how. And I could not. So I looked at her, trying to balance my expression midway between ‘Who are you?’ and ‘Darling!’ My brow must have been knit with the effort at recall, because she said, ‘It’s okay... I’m an actress.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Sorry about that.’ Turns out I didn’t know her. It was Helena Bonham Carter.

What? Yes, I most certainly do expect you to believe that on my first trip to London in months, the first person I met was the woman who, to your median American male movie-goer, is the embodiment of English womanhood. It is no less likely, after all, than an Englishwoman stepping off the plane in New York and being greeted by, say, Clint Eastwood. Probably happens all the time.

Maybe I have a knack for bringing out what is quintessentially English in England. As a teenager in the early 1980s, I took the Piccadilly line in from Heathrow, came up from the Tube at Earl’s Court and asked a passing woman where I could find the youth hostel. ‘Blimey!’ she said. ‘Dunno.’ So blimey was the first word ever spoken to me in England. I have never heard an English person of either sex use it since.

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