She wonders, as she passes through a magnificent archway, if she doesn’t look a little overdressed for the assignment. She doesn’t look like an ace reporter but a nervous provincial. The courtyard that opens out to her could be in St Petersburg, or what she imagines St Petersburg to be. Fountains play in front of elegant façades that enclose a huge piazza. She’s nearly forty minutes early, so she walks back out under the arch, her suit snagging in places, and finds a simple café up a small side street in Covent Garden – the sort of place she is used to, with bacon rolls and milky coffee and sandwich fillings in metal trays. She sips a latte – 300 calories – watching London in all its variety and weirdness go by. She can see that there is a huge difference between Londoners and West Country people. West Country people favour fleeces and vocational shoes, and the younger ones also like frayed string amulets and hoodies, whereas Londoners have a more hard-boiled look and their clothes are astonishingly varied and their hair looks expensive. Down her way people have a cheerful, calf-like expectancy. Early days, but there doesn’t seem to be much of that here. Londoners stride purposefully and grimly; bicycles flash by, going in every direction and through every traffic light and over every pavement, and nobody seems to complain. She feels as though she is the foreigner here in this vivid current. In half an hour she’s formed the idea that it’s time she moved to London. She asks for her bill; before it comes, she turns on the recorder in her inner pocket.