Rather than using schematic tourist maps or the more detailed police variety, I relied on my phone with its built-in GPS system. I didn’t want to gape at the little screen like some crazy gadget-fanatic, so I simply clipped on the earphone and walked along, following the commands dictated by the pleasant female voice. As everyone knows, apart from the standard voices you can find hundreds of patches for GPS systems on the Internet: if you prefer, you can have your route indicated to you by a grandiloquent Gorbachev or a punch-drunk Yeltsin or a fussy Medvedev, and for the true connoisseur there is even Lenin—“You are on the right road, comrades!” and Stalin—“Deviate to the right!” My soundtrack imitated some old film: “To the left, milord,” “To the right, milord,” and I liked that—somehow it seemed to fit well with Erasmus.

Well, first I walked along Albany Street, glancing curiously at the expensive mansions and old buildings, either of redbrick with little towers and bay windows, or with white walls and columns. It was a very touristy district, so I also came across the famous red telephone booths (strangely enough, in this age of digital mobile phones, people were still using them) and the impressive cylindrical forms of the Royal Mail’s postboxes (and people dropped letters into them in front of my very eyes). All this retro that the tourists go dewy-eyed for really did look quite natural, not at all affected, and yet again I was stung by sad thoughts of Moscow. What could my city have been like if it had not been demolished, reconstructed, and torn to pieces in order to squeeze profit out of every single clod of earth? Completely different from this, of course, but also alive and interesting—not the present soulless agglomeration of bleak new developments and dilapidated Stalin-era blocks with only rare, usually completely reconstructed old buildings.

The GPS whispered: “To the left, milord.” Obediently walking in through one of the entrances to Regent’s Park, I found myself in a kingdom of mighty trees, fragrant flowers, and people strolling along paths. Probably less than a third of them were actual Londoners—most were tourists with cameras.

I wondered where Erasmus actually lived. In a little shack surrounded by his beloved plants?

I suppressed an urge to glance at the screen. It was more interesting to follow the commands. The system’s memory included even the narrowest little paths, and I followed them deeper and deeper into the park. There wasn’t any real wilderness here, of course, there couldn’t possibly be, but I encountered fewer and fewer tourists.