 | |
 |
 |
London Calling1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Itinerary | Home
Beautiful women clad in totemic Paco Rabanne sheaths and Jimmy Choo sandals orchestrate the Bee Gees with the ritual insouciance of big cats. Their long arms slash the fug wafting from gold-tipped cigarettes and thick cigars. They bat back the City Boy flâneurs who lean over the tiny dance floor, leering into the night, their chalk-striped suits just one badge of the modern parvenu. Tonight at Annabel’s, it’s all about staying alive. Fashionably located in Mayfair (and, rather unfashionably, home to what must be the world’s best steak sandwich), Annabel’s has been the iconic club for London’s smart set for two generations, a repository of both the modern and the ageless. It is something old and something new in a city that reinvents itself each day as surely as the Greenwich clock. Tonight in Annabel’s quieter front bar, three young women rearrange themselves like kittens. They are two Sophies and an Amanda, each at Cambridge, each a privileged daughter of England’s post-Thatcher meritocracy, all impeccably groomed. (I particularly like the way Sophie number two holds her Pimm’s.) As they chat with us through the contrails of their cigarettes, their plumy voices roll vowels into occasional collisions with Jamie Oliver mockney-speak. That egalitarian self-awareness is true to modern England: The bright young things speak of university life and weekends in the country but are also careful to mention their charity work. “Our parents wanted us to apply for junior memberships at Annabel’s,” says one Sophie. “They’ve been members for ages.” “At first, it seemed too old,” Amanda allows, “but now we rather like it.” The entrance to Annabel’s on London’s Berkeley Square is marked only by the phalanx of long automobiles treble-parked outside. As well as signalling the changing of the generational guard, Annabel’s speaks to our mission: to find the London that goes on behind closed doors in a city whose polished citizenry know that the secret markers of life – the proper restaurants, clubs, tailors, gallery openings and even barbers – still properly describe the man. I’ve come to London countless times, certainly more than 50 but probably fewer than 100. It’s a statistic remarkably similar to the difference between a love affair and a more permanent arrangement. This morning, the affair continues in our venture to find both timeless tradition and Modern Britain in this very contemporary city. Yvonne and I lie abed in our rambling suite of rooms, high atop that old Art Deco devil, the Savoy. The BBC News is on the telly, and we are warm under a thick duvet of Sunday newspapers and superior linens. Shards of croissant and dollops of good preserves litter the sheets, and underneath our bedroom windows, the putty-coloured Thames begins to stir. |
