And everywhere else seems slightly old-fashioned after London. Even its squalor becomes stylised into a kind of desperate Dickensian cuteness: squat chic. But, unlike the Continentals, no one slavishly follows fashion in London Instead, they make fashion Everyone looks different. Barricades? Where could you put them? People would just go round another way It's impossible to have such big adventures in London. But, if all else fails, the city uses its secret weapon: naffification London consumes fads, ideas, cultures at the highest speed.

Take any of it too seriously, and you become naff.The lurid excess and charm, the thudding collisions of it and the failure of collisions, too, makes a style of no style and every style. London is too big and too fragmented for mass behaviour of the revolutionary sort, and the streets are too narrow and bendy. Cooking is my hobby - whenever I want to relax, I cook.and imaginative nightclub scene in the world. Almost every pressure group in the city, including the police, wants to do away with the 11pm rule, but, paradoxically, the result is to hand the city over to the young after-hours, because London is ageist.Ending 11pm closing would open up the city at night to a much wider age group.This fear that the mighty stewpot could boil over any second - don't let it get to you. They have olives, wholemeal bread, brown rice, all the things I want - I'm a health freak.