8 July 2026

I’d return to some old lovers like a shot, but never to London

I once had my own seat at the Coach and Horses’ bar

Photo by Charlie Bonallack/Millennium Images, UK

Another trip to That London, first for the youngest’s birthday, then, after a sleep on the family sofa, to Noble Rot in Soho: the Pint-Sized Polis has passed another one of her brainy exams, and wants to celebrate by taking me and her mother to the restaurant, which has a good set-menu lunch deal. (Three courses for £28, with a glass of wine for each course. The portions are not huge, reminding me of my mother, in New York, looking at a sliver of asparagus and saying to the waiter, “Can you spare it?” – but they are very good.) So we sat upstairs, where Martin Rowson’s oil paintings of Soho nightlife are hung. The last time I was here, I was sitting with Rowson himself, and we had an epic eight-hour lunch, which I wrote about here. I remember being a bit miffed at not being included in the tableau of Soho types and I think I said so, but he was paying, so maybe I didn’t. That afternoon was a bit of a blur.

Afterwards I suggested we adjourn to the Coach and Horses, where the late Norman Balon, and the late Jeffrey Bernard, and the late Bruce Bernard, and the late God knows how many used to hold court. (“I had not thought death had undone so many”: TS Eliot, after Dante.) I might not be in Rowson’s painting but I was definitely there, and it was funny being back in the Coach again, where I used to prop the bar up until closing time, trying to avoid the poisonous P— and chatting with my best friend there, M—, who was a stage hand at Les Mis, which had just opened, over the road. (“Huh,” I said to myself, “that won’t last.”)

I gave the PSP and her mother a little tour of the place, pointing out the cartoons – Michael Heath’s “The Regulars”, in which I also never featured – and the photographs of Norman and Jeffrey and the others. The brewery, Fullers, were thinking of turning the place into a sports bar but there was an outcry, to which I added my still, small voice, and they backed down.

I told my stories from the Coach; about how I had my own seat at the bar, about how the double whiskies were the price of a pint (now, because no pubs serve cooking Scotch any more, the cheapest stuff you can get is Chivas Regal, for crying out loud), about the beautiful barmaid from Edinburgh, Debbie, who took me to her bed after I gave her a packet of dark-chocolate-coated Brazil nuts (by way of apologising for squirting her with the soda siphon the night before), about… actually, I stopped at Debbie, for I went into a reverie about her, and about the other girls I had taken there – even when I was still going out with her. Forgive me: I was 22, and my university years had been more sex free than I would have liked. They are, of course, now entirely sex free, hence my reverie.

“Ah, no; the years, the years; /Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.” (Not one of mine. Thomas Hardy, who was always in a reverie about his women.)

I pulled myself together and rejoined the conversation. It is nice to have been pulled into this family’s orbit. The PSP was the one whose passing-out parade at Hendon I wrote about last month.

“If you had the chance,” asked the PSP as we had a crafty fag outside (“You keep an eye on the table, mum”), “would you move back to London?”

I thought about this. And then I thought: the fact that I’m having to think about this shows that I may have voluntarily relinquished my status as a Londoner. Had Rowson deigned to put me in his painting, would my image be fading, or have vanished altogether, as people’s images disappear when they have been erased from the timeline in sci-fi stories?

Whenever I think about London, and the possibility of going back there, my hesitation is part of the story. It is like thinking of a former lover. Would I go back to Debbie? Not really; she might have been astonishingly beautiful but she was, in Jeffrey Bernard’s words, daft as a brush – not that I can claim to be free of daftness myself these days. I thought of some other former lovers, and, yes, some of those I’d go back to like a shot if I could. But London?

Let me put it this way: today, before filing this, I sat on the beach in the sunshine and the freshening wind, reading my book, The Quantity Theory of Morality, by Will Self, who is in Rowson’s painting (the book is, so far, very good). I then strolled along the seafront and had a little pot of cockles from an old-style beachside shack for £4. I remembered that I had been invited to the unveiling of a blue plaque for Stefan Zweig – followed by a screening of The Grand Budapest Hotel a film I love ever more with each viewing – but I had forgotten about it. Had I remembered in time, would I have still gone? Well, not really, because I have two deadlines today, but even if I hadn’t, I think I’d have stayed put in Brighthelmstone.

[Further reading: The taming of the Wag]