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. I'm an early riser and Lina's is open early, so I drop in at eight o'clock in the morning on my way to work and buy bits and pieces. 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.

I love watching the professional people-watchers who are flown in from New York specifically to spend two hours trend-spotting in Old Compton Street and dictating reports into voice recorders: "spotted: blue anoraks - major trend; nine people with nose rings, four with green hair; tattoos particularly strong."everywhere rapidly. If you sit outside the Cafe Boheme on Old Compton Street, one moment a multi-pierced and tattooed pop-star will walk past, followed by someone who asks you for money for a cup of tea telling you that "credit cards are accepted". There is not much piazza culture, but there's plenty of street activity, which involves hurrying past others to your destination, glancingDaniel Poole, designerIt's the unique street theatre. Therefore, London is a secret city - of clubs, societies, in-groups, street cults, telephone numbers Privacy is a London fetish. As outsiders, the centre is simpler for them; it's not clogged with memory.It all sits very uneasily together; only a certain reserve makes it possible at all. Folk from the European Union have free access; then there are the Middle Easterners, the New Russians, the South Americans.. it's terrific.