I had visited the capital before although my friend Arthur had not, I first visited London as a student, reluctantly released from the bosom of a tearful mum,with a traveling trunk stuffed full of home-made fruit cakes and woolly vests. I was ill-prepared for the Spartan standards of the South. Through even the grimmest post-war days, as kids we had ploughed our way through corner cuts of beef and steamed puddings. So you can imagine my dismay when I arrived, that first day, at my London digs to be faced with a plate of tuna-paste sandwiches and a thin slice of cake left curling under a tea-towel. And that was supposed to be Sunday lunch! When I eventually caught up with my extremely irritating landlady, I met with a vision of splendor more in keeping with the Royal Enclosure at the races than the area in which she lived. Festooned with jewels and furs and plastered with exclusive cosmetics, she was a walking advert for Bond Street. Now, we have a none too elegant but very apt phrase for this in the North of England, and it was the one my friend Arthur to describe London after three days there: 'All fur coat and nothing underneath.' Take our hotel. The reception area was plush and inviting, the lounge and dining-room pood enough to start Arthur speaking 'properly'. But journey upstairs from one landing to the next, at the veneers of civilization fell away before your eyes. By the time we reached our room, pretension to refinement and comfort had disappeared. The fur coat was off(back in the bands of the hire purchase company), and what we were really expected to put up with for a small fortune a night was exposed in all its shameful nakedness. It was little more than a garret, a shabby affair with patched and peeling walls. There was a stained sink with pipes that grumbled and muttered all night long and an assortment of furnishings that would have disgraced Her Majestys Prison Service. But the crowning glory was the view from the window. A peek behind the handsome facade of our fabled city. Rank gardens choked with rubbish, all the debris of life piled against the back door. It was a good job the window didnt open, because from it all arose the unmistakable odor of the abyss. Arthur, whose mum still polishes her back step and disinfects her dustbin once a week, slumped on to the bed in a sudden fit of depression. Never mind, I said, drawing the curtains. You can watch telly. This was one of the hotels luxuries, which in the newspaper ad had persuaded us we were going to spend the week in style. It turned out to be a yellowing plastic thing with a picture which rolled over and over like a floundering fish until you took your fist to it. But Arthur wasnt going to be consoled by any cheap technological gimmicks. He was sure his dad had forgotten to feed his pigeons and that his dogs were pining away for him. He grew horribly homesick. After a terrible night spent tossing and turning to a ceaseless cacophony of pipes and firedoors, traffic, drunks and low-flying aircraft, Arthur surfaced next day like a claustrophobic mole. London had got squarely on top of him. Seven million people had sat on him all night, breathed his air, generally fouled his living space, and come between him and that daily quota of privacy and peace which prevents us all from degenerating into mad axemen or reservoir poisoners. Arthur had to be got out of London for a while. When the writer first came to the capital____.