The price of a taxi in London could make a person faint. Come to that, the price of a ride on the Underground could bring on the vapours, too. The same could be said for a night out in one of the capital’s dining establishments. If you live in East London, the West End will seem a foreign country; the same applies to South and North. Like any good Londoner, I love to complain about the city I’ve lived in for 15 years. And yet the truth is I don’t long to move back to my home town of New York City. It is a nice place to visit, but . . . as the saying goes.

Why? There is no Borough Market in New York. Yes, there is Union Square. Not the same. When I first moved to Britain more than 20 years ago, you were doomed to eat and buy a lot of stuff that was almost hilariously disgusting. That is not the case now and if you want to know the name of the pig you are about to eat, you will find that out in London but rarely in New York. New York has Grand Central station, a beautiful place, indeed — but now that London has St Pancras once again, all bets are off when it comes to industrial architecture. While you can travel from Grand Central to Poughkeepsie, you can travel from St Pancras to Paris. See?

London is a queer, mysterious place. London has the London Stone and the grave of William Blake, though no one really knows exactly where he lies. London has double-decker buses, a thrill that never palls for the non-native. London is less impressed with itself than New York, although that city no longer proclaims itself “The Capital of the World”, as it used to. I like that London shrugs and lets its citizens get on with their lives — even if it costs them an arm and a leg to do so.

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