Elysian Fields, but without dying...*

I never actually played on the Bowling Green

Squeezing this into 300 words will be hard, but that’s my rule. Entering journalism at 15 was like winning a Nobel prize, if without the money. Quickly I realised I’d outgrown my home city, Bradford. Even more so, parochial Bingley. I yearned for London; see why, below

● Many press conferences were held in the West End, London’s swanky bit, just over 2 miles from where I worked. I always walked. For the smell of it and the snotty company of uncaring Londoners.

● Drama happened. Crossing the Thames at low water (by bridge) I saw a male corpse, legs and arms outstretched, half embedded in the mud. Death could hardly have been more anonymous.

● After a press do, having imbibed “one or two”, I’d call in at Foyles, London’s best-known bookshop. An awkward assembly of smallish rooms with an unnecessarily antique method for paying. Londoners learn to tolerate discomfort.

● London’s pubs are notoriously unwelcoming and costly. Even so, London hosts the best pub in the world: The Trafalgar, on the very edge of the Thames, near Greenwich. Sit in the curve of a bow window; downstream The Dome, an arena resembling a huge flattened mushroom; ahead the towers of Canary Wharf – London’s Wall Street; upstream hints of Tower Bridge.

● VR, then VT, was a nurse at Charing Cross Hospital, within spitting distance of Trafalgar Square. We courted each other in what Dr Johnson called The Great Wen. Nowhere could have been more romantic.

● Saw my first opera in London, Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

● Lunched at Rules, the Savoy, Le Gavroche, three mega-pricey restaurants. Somebody else paid.

● Bought wine at Berry Bros, as did the late Queen.

*... and without being obvious.