Documents on the God forbid that the Evening Standard ever find out that we were living in a brothel. September 22, 2005 (Thursday) London (England) UP at 6:50 a.m., and take Jessica to school in Hammersmith. Chatty as ever. A gentleman from Tonga, a former Empire colony, is among those applying today to go on my mailing list. He has a name resonant with the drumbeat of the South Pacific.

I reply: “Who can forget Queen Salote [of Tonga] at the 1953 Coronation!” — a majestic Black dowager, she rode through the appreciative crowds in an open carriage, despite the London rain.

“It is good to know that I have friends around the world supporting me like this,” I add, “particularly as I am faced this week with the added cost of moving to a new address” — we have been living at Hertford Street, at the foot of the Hilton Tower, but our landlord, the fragrantly named Normandie Estates, has now filled the building with Eastern European hookers; the landlord pretends not to know; and the ladies affect to speak no English.

When I address them in Russian they don’t answer that either. Three months ago, when I was in Key West, our Hertford Street building was raided by a Scotland Yard SWAT team tipped off about Russian white slavers. The armed police were about to crash in through our basement windows, as they could not get through the door of the apartment they were investigating — B. frostily advised them of their mistake.

The apartment in question, No.1, is rented to a Mr Valentin Malkov : I wonder what else there is to know about him. Welcome to Mr Sanctimonious Blair’s brave new England! He is deeply, yes, deeply concerned about the rights of women in Iraq; meanwhile our own birth country, England, is becoming more different each month from the country that I grew up in, that’s for sure. God forbid that the Evening Standard ever find out that we are now living in a brothel.

The Londoner’s Diary would make hay, so we have no choice but to move elsewhere. B. seems markedly better this afternoon and evening. September 23, 2005 (Friday) London (England) I WRITE to Alan H.: “We have now signed up and paid for the new address and look forward to seeing you tomorrow morning. I have started shifting stuff out into the entrance hall here to facilitate things and I will try to hire another pair of hands. . . The Führer HQ photo album has arrived here — it is very good.

You’ll be thrilled.” September 24, 2005 (Saturday) London (England) THE big move begins. At Queen Anne’s Gate, […] is parking her car in front of our truck. “Are you a White Van Man,” she asks imperiously; well, I am dressed in shorts, grimy, and covered in perspiration. I identify myself. “Oh, yes, I thought I recognized you.” She is very friendly and chatty. I say I have featured her former husband and his brother in my writings as “Schmutz and Schund.” “How very naughty,” she says. […]

Dead tired by nine pm, having lifted, swept, polished, packed and more all day long. I flop into bed; our new apartment is immaculately clean and furnished, and I have chosen the one rear room overlooking only the central atrium, which should be very quiet. The agency have assured me is that the only noise to be expected is once a week at midday as Her Majesty’s Guard parade past our windows to the Palace half a mile away.

But then the nightmare begins, as an unexpected heavy-metal disco begins at around ten pm. The selfish, hideous blare (no reflection on our prime minister intended) lasts all night. B. tells me that the organizer had rung our doorbell during the evening and said through the loudspeaker he would be having a DJ and he hoped we would not mind, “come down for a drink beforehand,” if we wished, etc.

I am woken with a jolt at ten by the thunderous cacophony; it is spewing forth into the atrium below at maximum volume, hundreds of decibels, coming from the open windows of the ground floor, filling the space with vibrating thumps and sounds, non stop, without a pause between the different sequences. I am like Dudley Moore in the movie “Ten”, wakened from his narcomaniac sleep at that beachhouse at Acapulco. Dead tired, and sleep-deprived. It is Abu Ghraib, but worse.

I lie awake wide-eyed and staring until three a.m., then can take no more. September 25, 2005 (Sunday) London (England) THREE a.m. I decide to transfer to the old flat to escape the noise, driving back across London to Hertford Street for one last night in the Mayfair where I have lived for the last forty years. As I leave, the disco party is spilling out into the street, probably what they call “chilling out” in druggy talk.

The old flat is now almost bare of furniture, but anything is better than the noise I have left behind. Up at seven, I complete the cleaning here, and drive