2:10 Pass the Hard Rock Café. Nobody’s queuing.

2:45 Soho. We walk past a street of empty wine bars and bookshops, and My Publisher tells me it used to be brothels once, a long time ago; then, Miami Spice and a functioning laserdisc player ahead of him, he tears off into the night.

I decide that I’m just going to wander aimlessly, resolve not to disappear into any seedy drinking clubs, even if I can find any (like Little Magic Shops, they have a tendency to vanish the next time you want them, replaced by brick walls or closed doors).

Under the tacky neon glare of Brewer Street a young woman holds a polystyrene head with a red wig on it. The Vintage Magazine Shop has the OZ “schoolkids” issue in the window.

3:31 At an all-night food place—Mr. Pumpernincks—on the corner of Piccadilly, I run into Ella. She’s blond, with smudged pink lipstick and red pumps, Day-Glo acidhouse wristbands. Looks fifteen, assures me she’s really nearly nineteen and tells me not to eat the popcorn because it “tastes like earwax.”

Turns out she’s a nightclub hostess. I assume this is my first encounter tonight with the seamy side of London nightlife. She shakes her head. Her job, she explains, is to sell as much champagne as possible on commission, pour her glass on the floor when the customer “goes to the loo,” spill as much as she can. It’s all a con, she sighs: £12 for a salmon sandwich, £12 for a packet of forty cigarettes, no one spends less than £100 a night, and last week she was offered £5,000 by five Swedish men to sleep with them.

She said no. She doesn’t think she’s hard enough for the business. Ella comes down to Mr. Pumpernincks to drink the rotten coffee and sober up every night. She came up from Bath to the big city a month or so back; her ambition in life is to steal a Porsche 911 Turbo, and possibly even to get a driving license.

4:30 I’m in Brewer Street again. Six pigeons on the road in front of me; one of them doesn’t have any toes. My Publisher was right.

In Wardour Street a small heap of Goths huddle together, walking warily. I can’t figure out why: there’s no one around to menace them, but maybe they don’t know that.

It’s sort of boring; there’s simply no one about. I start fantasizing a mugging to break up the monotony of empty chill streets; I could probably claim it back on expenses.

Ella’s gone the next time I pass Piccadilly.

In one of the back streets behind Shaftesbury Avenue, I walk past some accordion doors with something written on them. Walking toward them it reads OPRIG. Parallel it says NO PARKING. Looking back over my shoulder it reads N AKN. I wonder briefly if somebody is trying to tell me something, then conclude I’m getting tired, or transcendently bored.

On the Charing Cross Road a little old Chinese lady teeter-totters on the pavement, gesturing at taxis that ignore her. She looks lost. Leicester Square is utterly deserted.