Last summer I met a friend from Los Angeles for lunch at La Goccia in Covent Garden. On the walk back to her hotel, she began remarking how ‘cute’ everything was. The ‘sidewalks’ were cute. The lampposts were cute. Monmouth Coffee was, obviously, cute. Sigh, such is the power of novelty — and a five-star hotel to start and end the day in.
Seeing your own hometown through the misty, rose-tinted lenses of an outsider, however, is more challenging. Nearly two decades in London meant that where she saw charm everywhere, I saw errands to be checked off.
