thisbookisnotforthefriendwhosaid-verybigcity（481页）.docVIP

These pages are not for the person who said: “I’ve got a wonderful new flat: you’d never know you were in Naples.” Nor for the person who said: “What I love about London is its village atmosphere…” but for the person who, after a reluctant visit to the country, said, with real alarm: “I mean…there are so many fields.” NEED THESE STREETS I am twelve, in Paris. My father has rented a flat near the Parc Montsouris in the south of the city. My parents let us (two brothers, sister and me) go for a walk the first day. My elder brother leads us purposefully down the Avenue Reille. “No! This way, this way!” I shout (knowing intuitively, as I have always known) “You’re going away from the centre!” “So what? says my brother, “we’re only going for a walk!” I trail behind, almost tearful at this wilful neglect of what is, for me, an imperative, the urban imperative. It has always mattered. Twenty six years later I go to Budapest for a month’s work. My kind hosts meet me at the airport to take me to my hotel. They speed me, tantalisingly, into the centre and then, horror! out, God knows how far out, to a Holiday Inn type edifice; no harm in that per se; but it is practically in the country. I stick it there two nights. As I have dinner alone over a book, serenaded at my very table by a “gypsy” trio, I decide enough! Tactfully I enquire about alternatives. “But”, say my hosts, “we thought English people liked the country”. Not this one, I mutter. Within the day I am installed in a creaky flat where Nepkoztarsasag meets (what was) Lenin Boulevard. Hot water is erratic; the lift is a mantrap, an advertising hoarding floods the bedroom with a sickly light. Trams clank and splutter outside the window. I am content. This craving for metropolis may not require the services of an Oliver Sachs; but I do wonder sometimes why it matters, casting about in vaguely psychoanalytical way for the source for my metrophilia. I know, for example,