Read Notes From a Small Island for Free Online Page A

weekend than concede even fractional ignorance of The Knowledge, which I think is rather sweet. So what they do instead is probe. They drive for a bit, then glance at you in the mirror and in an over-casual voice say, 'Hazlitt's - that's the one on Curzon Street, innit, guv? Opposite the Blue Lion?' But the instant they see a knowing smile of demurral forming on your lips, they hastily say, 'No, hang on a minute, I'm thinking of the Hazelbury. Yeah, the Hazelbury. You want Hazlitt's, right?' He'll drive on a bit in a fairly random direction. 'That's this side of Shepherd's Bush, innit?' he'll suggest speculatively.
When you tell him that it's on Frith Street, he says, 'Yeah, that's the one. Course it is. I know it - modern place, lots of glass.'
'Actually, it's an eighteenth-century brick building.'
'Course it is. I know it.' And he immediately executes a dramatic U-turn, causing a passing cyclist to steer into a lamppost (but that's all right because he has on cycle clips and one of those geeky\
slipstream helmets that all but invite you to knock him over). 'Yeah, you had me thinking of the Hazelbury,' the driver adds, chuckling as if to say it's a lucky thing he sorted that one out for you, and then lunges down a little side-street off the Strand called Running Sore Lane or Sphincter Passage, which, like so much else in London, you had never noticed was there before.
Hazlitt's is a nice hotel, but the thing I like about it is that it doesn't act like a hotel. It's been there for years, and the staff are friendly -always a novelty in a big city hotel - but they do manage to give the slight impression that they haven't been doing this for very long. Tell them that you have a reservation and want to check in and they get a kind of panicked look and begin a perplexed search through drawers for registration cards and room keys. It's really quite charming. And the delightful girls who clean the rooms - which, let me say, are always spotless and exceedingly comfortable - seldom seem to have what might be called a total command of English, so that when you ask them for a bar of soap or something, you see that they are watching your mouth closely and then, pretty generally, they return after a bit with a hopeful look bearing a pot plant or a commode or something that is manifestly not soap. It's a wonderful place. I wouldn't go anywhere else.
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