It's an Italian family business, and has been there for 30 or 40 years. Because there's no red-light district, for example, you have to order over the telephone, which has the disadvantage that you cannot see what you are getting.And pubs must close at 11pm, which has had the side-effect of giving London the most vigorousNaim Attallah, publisher, has lived in London since 1949; he now lives in MayfairI adore Lina's grocery shop in Brewer Street, Soho. But there are fears that panic may be just around the corner, so it throws cold water on certain activities. Someone will come by just for you.London itself has never been in a state of panic, which is astonishing - not during the Gordon Riots, not during the Blitz, not even during the unbuttoning of Swinging London, when the whole place levitated in a cloud of rainbow chiffon.

A social life has to be deliberately constructed and sustained: take your eye off it for a second and it vaporises. The whole town can sometimes seem like a hyper-anxious cruising joint, everyone simultaneously yearning and rejecting. In London, everyone hungers to be involved but nobody wants to get too involved because where will it end? And if all this nervous ambivalence gets too much, just relax - everyone but everyone passes through this town. Since you drown in London if you don't know what you want, you fairly quickly decide what your key objectives are, always remembering that you are too polite to mention them. Londoners concentrate on their destinations as though these precious certainties might vanish if they didn't.It is a bad city for lateral activities such as flirting, but a good city for highly focused activities, such as picking up.