It's called Hazlitt's because it was the home of the essayist^ and all the bedrooms are named after his chums or women he shagged there or something. I confess that my mental note card for the old boy is a trifle sketchy. It reads: Hazlitt (sp?), William (?), English (poss. Scottish?) essayist. Lived: before 1900. Most famous work: don't know. Quips, epigrams, bons mots: don't know. Other useful information: his house is now a hotel.

 As always, I resolved to read up on Hazlitt some time to correct this gap in my knowledge and, as always, immediately forgot it. Instead, I dropped my rucksack on the bed, extracted a small notebook and a pen, and hit the streets in a spirit of enquiry and boyish keenness.

 I do find London exciting. Much as I hate to agree with that tedious old git Samuel Johnson, and despite the pompous imbecility of his famous remark about when a man is tired of London he is tired of life (an observation exceeded in fatuousness only by 'Let a smile be your umbrella'), I can't dispute it. After seven years of living in the country in the sort of place where a dead cow draws a crowd, London can seem a bit dazzling.

 I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is far more beautiful and interesting than Paris, if you ask me, and more lively than anywhere but New York and even New York can't touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theatres, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more courteous inhabitants than any other large city in the world.

 And it has more congenial small things incidental civilities you might call them than any other city I know: cheery red pillar boxes, drivers who actually stop for you on pedestrian crossings, lovely forgotten churches with wonderful names like St Andrew by the Wardrobe and St Giles Cripplegate, sudden pockets of quiet like Lincoln's Inn and Red Lion Square, interesting statues of obscure Victorians in togas, pubs, black cabs, doubledecker buses, helpful policemen, polite notices, people who will stop to help you when you fall down or drop your shopping, benches everywhere. What other great city would trouble to put blue plaques on houses to let you know what famous person once lived there or warn you to look left or right before stepping off the kerb? I'll tell you. None.

 Take away Heathrow Airport, the weather and any building that Richard Seifert ever laid a bony finger to, and it would be nearly perfect. Oh, and while we're at it we might also stop the staff at the British Museum from cluttering the forecourt with their cars and instead make it into a kind of garden, and also get rid of those horrible crush barriers outside Buckingham Palace because they look so straggly and cheap not at all in keeping with the dignity of her poor besieged Majesty within. And, of course, put the Natural History Museum back to the way it was before they started dicking around with it (in particular they must restore the display case showing insects infesting household products from the 1950s), and remove the entrance charges from all museums at once, and make Lord Palumbo put the Mappin and Webb building back, and bring back Lyons Corner Houses but this time with food you'd like to eat, and maybe the odd Kardomah for old times' sake, and finally, but most crucially, make the board of directors of British Telecom go out and personally track down every last red phone box that they sold off to be used as shower stalls and garden sheds int farflung corners of the globe, make them put them all back and then sack them no, kill them. Then truly will London be glorious again.

 This was the first time in years I'd been in London without having anything in particular to do and I felt a small thrill at finding myself abroad and unrequired in such a great, teeming urban organism. I had an amble through Soho and Leicester Square, spent a little time in the bookshops on Charing Cross Road rearranging books to my advantage, wandered aimlessly through Bloomsbury and finally over to Gray's Inn Road to the old Times building, now the offices of a company I had never heard of, and felt a pang of nostalgia such as can only be known by those who remember the days of hot metal and noisy composing rooms and the quiet joy of being paid a very good wage for a twentyfivehour week.

 When I started at The Times in 1981, just after the famous yearlong shutdown, overmanning and slack output were prodigious to say the least. On the Company News desk where I worked as a subeditor, the fiveman team would wander in about twothirty and spend most of the afternoon reading the evening papers and drinking tea while waiting for the reporters to surmount the daily challenge of finding their way back to their desks after a threehour lunch involving several bottles of jolly decent Chateauneuf du Pape; compose their expenses; complete hunched and whispered phone calls to their brokers with regard to a little tip they'd picked up over the creme brulee; and finally produce a page or so of copy before retiring parched to the Blue Lion across the road. At about halfpast five, we would engage in a little light subbing for an hour or so, then slip our arms into our coats and go home. It seemed very agreeably unlike work. At the end of the first month, one of my colleagues showed me how to record imaginary expenditures on an expense account sheet and take it up to the third floor, where it could be exchanged at a little window for about. 100 in cash more money, literally, than I had ever held before. We got six weeks' holiday, three weeks' paternity leave and a month's sabbatical every four years. What a wonderful world Fleet Street then was and how thrilled I was to be part of it.

 Alas, nothing that good can ever last. A few months later, Rupert Murdoch took over The Times and within days the building was full of mysterious tanned Australians in white shortsleeved shirts, who lurked in the background with clipboards and looked like they were measuring people for coffins. There is a story, which I suspect may actually be true, that one of these functionaries wandered into " a room on the fourth floor full of people who hadn't done anything in years and, when they proved unable to account convincingly for themselves, sacked them at a stroke, except for one fortunate fellow who had popped out to the betting shop. When he returned, it was to an empty room and he spent the next two years sitting alone wondering vaguely what had become of his colleagues.

 In our department the drive for efficiency was less traumatic. The desk I worked on was subsumed into a larger Business News desk, which meant I had to work nights and something more closely approximating eighthour days, and we also had our expenses cruelly lopped. But the worst of it was that I was brought into regular contact with Vince of the wire room.

 Vince was notorious. He would easily have been the world's most terrifying human had he but been human. I don't know quite what he was, other than it was five foot six inches of wiry malevolence in a grubby Tshirt. Reliable rumour had it that he was not born, but had burst fullformed from his mother's belly and then skittered off to the sewers. Among Vince's few simple and generally neglected tasks was the nightly delivery to us of the Wall Street report. Each night I would have to go and try to coax it from him. He was generally to be found in the humming, unattended mayhem of the wire room, lounging in a leather chair liberated from an executive office upstairs, with his bloodtipped Doc Martens plonked on the desk before him beside, and sometimes actually in, a large open box of pizza.

 Every night I would knock hesitantly at the open door, and politely ask if he had seen the Wall Street report, pointing out that it was now quarterpast eleven and we should have had it at halfpast ten. Perhaps he could look for it among the reams of unwatched paper tumbling out of his many machines?