As my doctor had instructed me to take exercise, and still hoping I had the energy of a young man, I decided to walk from west London to the party. After about forty-five minutes I was breathless and feeble. There were no taxis around and I felt stranded on the dusty, mostly deserted streets. I wanted to sit down in a shaded park, but doubted whether I’d be able to get up again, and there was no one to help me. Many of the boozers I’d have dropped into for a pint of bitter and a read of the evening paper, full of local semi-derelicts escaping their families—alcoholics, they’d be called, now everyone has been pathologized—had become bars, bursting with hyperactive young people. I wouldn’t have attempted to get past the huge doormen. At times, London appeared to be a city occupied by cameras and security people; you couldn’t go through a door without being strip-searched or having your shoes and pockets examined, and all for your own good, though it seemed neither safer nor more dangerous than before. There was no possibility of engaging in those awful pub conversations with wretched strangers which connected you to the impressive singularity of other people’s lives. The elderly seem to have been swept from the streets; the young appear to have wires coming out of their heads, supplying either music, voices on the phone, or the electricity that makes them move.

Yet I’ve always walked around London in the afternoons and evenings. These are relatively long distances, and I look at shops, obscure theaters, and strange museums, otherwise my body feels clogged up after a morning’s desk work.

The party was held not in my friend’s flat but in her rich brother’s place, which turned out to be one of those five-floor, wide stucco houses near the zoo.

When at last I got to the door, a handful of kids in their twenties turned up at the same time.

“It’s you,” said one, staring. “We’re doing you. You’re on the syllabus.”

“I hope I’m not causing you too much discomfort,” I replied.

“We wondered if you might tell us what you were trying to do with—”

“I wish I could remember,” I said. “Sorry.”

“We heard you were sour and cynical,” murmured another, adding, “and you don’t look anything like your picture on the back of your books.”