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A 19th century Russian literary critic once remarked that to write a good book about Russia, one had to leave it first. I think this can be applied not just to Russia, but to any place one had felt attached to before having to leave it. I have left London again – for the umpteenth time – despite my friends' advice to the contrary. Again, I have ignored Sydney Smith's pronouncement that any life led out of London is a mistake – bigger or smaller, but still a mistake. I know it is, but keep leaving London, walking out on it like on an unfaithful woman, whom I still love, only to miss her almost to tears and then – against all odds – to come back again. Indeed, there is something distinctly feminine about London (at least, to me there definitely is). No wonder the English, while talking or writing about London, sometimes use pronoun “she”. And it’s not just the English. Didn't I myself once compare London in summer to a curvaceous bikini-clad blonde who has wandered by mistake into a drab male-only Pall Mall club?

Never before, it seems, have I missed London as much as now – after my latest “walk-out”on her. Perhaps, time has come to do a book about it? About London as a state of mind, as a chameleon city, effortlessly adjusting to my changing moods: grieving and rejoicing with me – like no other place in the world. About the city, constantly opening up new horizons, offering hope and snatching it away the moment you succumb to her treacherous charms. Karl Baedeker once called Paris “the temptress of a city”. If so, London is probably the bitch of a city - an expensive and devious, yet totally irresistible, whore. It’s a dangerous liaison for a writer.

“Having become a Westerner, better, a Londoner...” - this is a snippet from a Financial Times review of one of my books. I like the ostentatious and somewhat cocky “better, a Londoner” and tend to regard it as the highest praise I have ever received. The reviewer, whose name I cannot recall, was right, for “Londoner” is not just a term of residence, but rather an honorary title (like knighthood, perhaps?), bestowed on those, who – whether they realise it or not – have won the main prize in the lottery of life.

Before starting the book, it is important to understand where my ever-growing passion for London stems from. I am inclined to believe that it originates from my childhood in the dusty Ukrainian city of Kharkov (or Kharkiv as one is supposed to call it as of 1991, when Ukraine regained its independence).

At the age of seven, I (together with three other boys of the same age) was cajoled into learning English. The name of the private teacher, hired by our persistent parents, was Grigoriy Alexandrovich Polonsky. He was a tall sturdy old man, with loud voice and droopy Cossack-style mustache. In his youth, he studied at a pre-revolutionary grammar school, from which he graduated in memorable 1917, the year of the Bolshevik coup d'etat , having mastered – alongside all his classmates, no doubt – three living and two dead (Latin and Ancient Greek) tongues.

Grigoriy Alexandrovich resided in a distant and obscure – like the Brahmaputra River – Kharkov suburb of Kholodnaya Gora (“Cold Mountain”). I can still see his lanky snow-covered frame (it must have snowed constantly in “Cold Mountain”), entering energetically, almost falling into our flat. In his battered capacious brief-case our teacher carried – among other things – some faded postcards with coloured views of London. They came from a hard-to-obtain “Cities of the Capitalist Inferno” (or something of that sort) postcard set, shoddily printed by our local “Red Proletarian” publishing house. These postcards were given out to us – one at a time – as prizes for diligence in our studies of the English language. A moral stimuli, so to speak.

For three “fives” (the highest mark in Russia and Ukraine) in a row we would be entitled to a bleak Piccadilly Circus postcard, for five – to the Buckingham Palace, for ten – to something more politically significant, like, say, the grave of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, featuring Marx's cartoon-like bust, with disproportionally huge head and bulging eyes, staring at the world with wild, cretinous rage.We were very proud of those postcards, gained in unfair battles with English irregular verbs. To please our parents, we even glued them into special albums.

I remember a badly drawn “British worker”, hastily printed into my Piccadilly Circus picture – probably on the orders of a vigilant postcard censor - to add a proper political balance to the otherwise rather decadent “capitalist” view, with no tractors or red banners in sight. With a Soviet-style flat cap on his head, the “worker” stood on the stairs next to the Eros statue holding a poster that ran simply: “1st of Mey” (the spelling mistake here is not mine, for even at the tender age of 7 I already knew how to write the names of the months correctly).

This “Mey” poster added some feline touch to the picture. At least in our still largely Russian-speaking little boys' eyes it did (Мяу in Russian equals English “meow”). Even now, crossing Piccadilly Circus, I cannot help looking down, so as not to stumble over one of the numerous cats that, as we had imagined, were swarming all over the square.

To earn enough “fives” for the “Piccadilly”, let alone “Karl Marl”, as we irreverently referred to the founder of Marxism, was not easy. And not just because of the fact that at the beginning of each lesson we had to recite from memory – in English! - “The Solemn Oath of the Young Pioneer”:
“I, a young pioneer of the Soviet Union, solemnly promise in the face of my comrades to love dearly my Soviet Motherland, to live, learn and fight (sic – VV) as the great Lenin bequeathed to us, as the Communist party teaches us!” (not that Grigoriy Alexandrovich was so hooray-patriotic, but being a teacher, even if private, he had to play by the rules, so to speak).
No, the main difficulty lay in our Pestalozzi's rather unorthodox teaching methods. These days they would have probably been branded “forceful immersion into a foreign-language environment” or something like that.

The whole truth was that, due to the total absence of that very “foreign-language environment” in our industrial Ukrainian city, “closed” for all foreigners, except for a few ever-tipsy Bulgarians, he had to invent it for us. That was why – as a way of introducing the verb “to pinch”, for example – he would squeeze our cheeks with his stiff pre-revolutionary fingers and wouldn't let go until the victims wailed – in English: “Stop pinching!!”

One day, Grigoriy Alexandrovich left behind his glasses in our flat. A couple of days later, his wife called to cancel our next lesson (and all the following ones, too), because our playful teacher had died suddenly of a heart attack. His glasses were still lying on our table, and I remember being amazed and somewhat puzzled by their sudden and rather scary good-for-nothing-ness.

At least, he could now practise his two dead languages in peace, or so I thought...

The teacher passed away, but our trophies – the postcards - remained. I looked at them for hours, and notwithstanding the awful quality of print, could not help admiring London's unique colour pattern: red buses and red pillar-boxes against the background of white Portland-stone houses... That was probably how I became an Anglophile. Or rather, a London-ophile.

When, many-many years later, I came to London for the first time, my immediate impression was how much it resembled the fuzzy postcards of my childhood! Even the ridiculous “worker” was still stuck near Eros, only his poster ran not “1st of Mey”, but “The End of the World is Nigh” which – as I already knew - was rubbish, because MY real world was only just beginning. I realised with sudden clarity that for all those years I had resided in an alien country and only now found my true spiritual home.

Lots and lots of murky Thames waters have flown under the bridges ever since. I did get settled in London and started studying it diligently – like the basics of English many years before. I was learning London by heart (a wonderfully precise idiom) – not like the pompous Young Pioneer's Oath, but like an overextended poem that had a beginning, but not an end. I soon discovered that “Londonology”, like every other science, had its own dons and professors - Charles Dickens, Walter Besant, HV Morton, Peter Ackroyd and “London perambulator” James Bone...

Eventually, I found in London all elements of my missing spiritual motherland: the house, where I was born (as a “Westerner, better – a Londoner”), with a red dragon on its roof and a foaming (in spring) cherry tree in the front garden, and my first (“Western”) love, the first school (even if not mine, but my son's), devoted friends, a dream job, wealth and poverty, joy and depression. I have discovered my favourite London spots, a little cafe in a vaulted basement, with tiny windows under the ceiling through which one can only see heads of passers-by floating above the street. Among them, I often discern the faces of my long-deceased friends and loved ones.

A lush Spanish garden, complete with chestnut trees, rustling willows, acacias, shady alleys, ducks and even flamingos on the roof (!) of a department store in Kensington. To get to it, one has to ascend to the sixth floor in an ordinary office lift. The garden looks exactly like the one I used to conjure up in my travel-hungry mind as a forced “arm-chair buccaneer”, encaged for over 35 years in the world's largest prison cell - the Soviet Union.

An abandoned and nearly always deserted little park in the very centre of London adjoining Lincoln's Inn Court, whose members, incidentally, have for centuries enjoyed a rare privilege of not having to stand up, when a toast to the Queen/King was pronounced. A much bigger park, a real forest - Highgate Wood, full of birds, bats and squirrels, the latter - so neat, orderly and civilised that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they duly pay taxes to the forest authorities.

A tiny Sunday market in Dulwich, where – for next to nothing – one can (or could, at least) buy time-beaten antiquarian guide-books that I had been collecting for many years. The Tylburn Convent next to the Marble Arch which one can visit only between 3 and 4 pm – the only hour of the day when the twenty-one Franciscan nuns, living in it, are allowed to talk. “What's wrong with me? I cannot stop blabbering today...” an old hunch-backed Sister kept muttering as she showed me around the Convent's chapel.
And so on ... and so on....

Yet, my most precious discovery so far is definitely Ely Place – a small and seemingly unremarkable cul-de-sac of a lane in Holborn. Even professional London historians are unaware of the fact that - geographically and administratively - this little street is not part of London, and that its correct postal address is Ely Place, Holborn Circus, London, Cambridgeshire. London policemen have no authority in it, and are only allowed there by invitation of the Commissioners of Ely, the lane's own elected governing body. This is all because the powerful Bishops of Ely acquired Ely Place and built their palatial residence there nearly five centuries ago. They made it part of their Cambridgeshire diocese, because, for some ministerial considerations, they had to remain de jure on their territory even while away on missions in London.

Miraculously, this curious anachronism has survived until now, and the “border” between London and “un-London” in the centre of London still runs straight through the old quirky pub “Ye Olde Mitre Tavern”, where (on both sides of the border) they serve London's cheapest and the tastiest sandwiches-toasties.

I often go there (to the street and to the pub, too) at moments of sadness and indecision. The very spirit of the “dislocated” lane, situated - simultaneously - in London and outside it, never fails to cheer me up and to remind me of my own irrevocable “dislocation”. Having visited Ely Place, I love walking through deserted and misty (fuzzy, like in those postcards of my childhood!) streets of the City that on weekends comes to resemble a house of close friends, from where all excessive furniture has been removed. And in the stillness of a Sunday morning, only occasionally broken by a police siren, one can almost hear from afar the muffled sound of Roman legionnaires' worn-out sandals shuffling against the cobbles.

I love crisp October mornings, when strolling through London is like walking inside a huge chilled wine glass, and fallen autumn leaves rest on the windscreens of parked cars, like yellow parking tickets issued by the strict traffic warden of autumn.

I love London's velvety summer nights, when nightingales scream their little lungs out in Berkeley Square, and a podgy full moon mooches about in the brandy-coloured sky, like a pot-bellied drunk trudging home from a pub.

I love its stormy nights, too, for when it stops raining, the young hook-like crescent breaks through the clouds and hangs precariously above Parliament Hill. I always feel tempted to hang my soaked umbrella onto it before remembering that I had left it behind at Heathrow airport the other day, “What's wrong with me? I cannot stop blabbering today...” Indeed. I never get tired of talking about my adopted home town - London.

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