First, an observation and caveat. Trying to write or do a podcast while suffering the lingering effects of Covid is hard. My brain was already rebelling against the idea of further productivity in the weeks after finally completing my book. Then came the second and third blows: my longstanding hypothesis that I possess coronavirus super-immunity was disproven, and the virus kicked off my third bout of inner-ear problems in as many months, making normal life a nausea-ridden, vertiginous minefield. But I’m still standing - just about - and I don’t want these depredations to be the coup de grace to Wednesday’s Ghost or anything else. So I fight on, perhaps with less energy and less coherence but with every ounce of commitment I can muster. I have a diary from the backpack journey that I took round Europe in the early 1990s. The first volume opens with a descent through layers of cloud, the mist parting in the moments before landing to reveal a green and pleasant land. I was 22, on a 20-dollar-a-day budget, wearing the one pair of shoes that would get me through the next two months: weatherbeaten, ill-fitting boots from the Army & Navy surplus store. I felt at home with what I found in London. ‘All these people clad in black here - really incredible,’ I wrote on the 4th of September, 1992. ‘I blend well. People ask me for directions on the Tube.’ I went to Highgate Cemetery a week later and proclaimed I wanted to live there. Mobile phones barely existed, and instead everyone clutched books: working their way through nonfiction tomes on public transport, perusing novels while walking along the street, enjoying a few stanzas of poetry in leafy Bloomsbury squares. I scribbled enthusiastically in an antique spiral-bound notebook, bound in deep-green fake lizard skin and embossed with ‘Daily Budget or Tax Records’ on the front. ‘The men here are incomparable,’ I wrote. Eventually, I did find a way to compare them. Seven years later I was landing on English soil again, trembling with excitement about seeing my fiancé, the first of three British men I would marry. Despite being engaged to him, I knew him so slightly that I struggled to recognise him at the airport. We’d met on a ski slope in Canada and had a couple of dates - it was before social media or smartphones with cameras, and after I went home, I had no record of what he looked like. He was just a voice on the telephone that asked me to marry him a few weeks after my return from holiday, and for reasons I can’t account for now, I said yes. At last count, I am averaging one marriage for each decade of my life in the UK. The first decade was the strangest, and the most royal. After 30-plus years, I’m able to think independently: I grasp the context, know my own mind. I’m familiar with this society and its nuances, and even if I wanted to, I’d be too chicken to hang out British-flag bunting or get out the big projector screen for the coronation tomorrow - in my neighbourhood, it’s not the done thing. There’s a street party in the offing, but I notice on the WhatsApp chat that many people are slightly apologetic about it, or at least tend to qualify their anticipation. No God Save the King!! or Rule Britannia!! here, just comments about how it’s nice to have an excuse to get the street together, share food, inflate a bouncy castle. This is East London, and you can’t swing a Sword of State without hitting a fair few anti-monarchist republicans. In my 20s, however, havning no inkling of any of this, I didn't know anything, and my fate could have been different. When I met my first British beau for our first date in an apres-ski bar in Canada, he was clad in what I now know what was coded clothing: scarlet 8-wale cordoroy trousers, canary-yellow socks, Gucci loafers with horsebit hardware, Oxford checked shirt, gold signet pinky ring. I thought he was an eccentric dresser, that’s all; I didn’t realise that every sartorial element point
