London

When you are old enough, you can measure your life in restaurants. I remember, for instance, when the Electric Diner on Portobello Road (named for a long ago and far away war) was a place to eat brunch, a meal that shouldn’t exist and doesn’t really, though if it belongs anywhere it belongs here. It was fine but glib – Notting Hill is either a place with no imagination or too much of it, I’m still not sure. How it can tolerate the truth of Grenfell Tower across the way I don’t know either, but I don’t live here. The diner is gone, replaced by a Thai restaurant that is

The Lavery in South Kensington is named for Sir John Lavery, official artist of the Great War and designer of the currency of the Irish Free State, who lived here, though he died in Ireland and is buried in Putney. Lavery, of course, would no longer recognise South Kensington as his home, and his white, monumental mid-Victorian house – it’s too cold to be compared to a wedding cake, it’s a power cake – is now a fashionable restaurant and ‘event space’, which I put in quotation marks so you know I didn’t write the words ‘event space’, I just typed them out. In houses like The Lavery, I wonder

On the face of it, Wormwood Scrubs is not particularly appealing. I don’t mean the prison, but the common in the north-eastern corner of Hammersmith and Fulham. It is 170 acres of unsupervised scrubland with enough wooded areas to attract a smattering of predatory homosexuals – a poor man’s Hampstead Heath. Often, as I walk the dog around the perimeter, the only people I encounter are single men in tight T-shirts who eye me enquiringly as we pass. I respond by looking pointedly at Mali, as if to say: ‘Can’t you see I’m walking my dog, not cruising for action?’ Then again, Mali is a Cavapoochon, so perhaps they don’t

I am mesmerised by the restaurants of Raffles London at the OWO (Old War Office) because war approaches and the Old War Office is now a stage set for food, floristry and linen. If this is civilisation – it isn’t really, but it thinks it is – who will protect it now? Will we even know if war has started – or care? It was a fine building when I first came – I have reviewed its chilly Mediterranean food, its manic Italian and its tepid French – and it still is. Grand hotels exist to suppress time. It is a preening Edwardian palace with crazed plinths, over-pliant staff and

In my last article, I introduced you to the ‘paceometer’, which shows how the relationship between an extra unit of speed and the consequent saving in journey time is anything but linear. For any given distance, the time saved by increasing your speed by an additional 10mph may be immense or almost irrelevant depending on how fast you are travelling already (accelerating from 5 to 15mph cuts 80 minutes off a ten-mile journey; accelerating from 60 to 70mph over the same distance saves little over a minute). It’s a useful insight: avoiding slowness is a far more important element of time-saving than pursuing ever higher speeds. It helps us understand,