Love is also disquiet, the brooding pleasures of doubt, midnights wasted by speculation, the frantic dance… — Laurie Lee

Now we go off to the office and come home in the evenings to cheap chicken and frozen peas. Very nice, but too much of it, too easy and regular, served up without effort or wanting. We eat, we are lucky, our faces are shining with fat, but we don't know the pleasure of being hungry any more.

Of course, there is one great virtue in size; and of course, London is the greatest show on earth, for never have so many human characters been gathered together in one place.  Here, in a day, you can see the world.  Stand at the entrance to a main-line railway station, during the rush-hour, and you see every possible human species scurrying past.  One becomes amazed and transported by the multiplicity of the human face, by its infinite differences, by its almost prismatic graduations from ugliness to beauty, evil to good.

Charm is the ultimate weapon, the supreme seduction, against which there are few defences.  If you've got it, you need almost nothing else, neither money, looks, nor pedigree.  It's a gift, only to be given away, and the more used the more there is.  It is also a climate of behaviour set for the perpetual summer and thermostatically controlled by taste and tact.