Gone but not Forgotten

Autumn has arrived at last. And Winter is coming. I can feel it in the sharpness of the morning air, the smell of distant frosts borne on easterly winds that fly straight from the Russian steppe and the mountains of Norway. Leaves smear themselves across the kerbs and gutters - still yellow or pale green. The night becomes cold enough to make one's fingers sting. The breath pillars smokily in the morning light as one hurries to the tube.

My year begins to come alive again at Halloween. Remembrance Sunday sees me wake and stretch. The rainy, windswept nights, the endless nights of a London Winter, are upon us. Darkness hides a multitude of sins, conceals the changes of nearly thirty years, and once again as I walk through Soho or Fitzrovia, I see them as they were in my youth. Seedy, somewhat down at heel, but alive and real. Soho has had a bit of nip and tuck and looks pretty good these days but, well - somehow I preferred her with a little too much flesh, a sagging jawline, gin on her breath. Like an older mistress, She was not always pretty but my God she was fun. And we knew the score: No illusions.

Last week I went to visit a tailor's in Soho for a fitting and found that a whole block, an area where I had once got up to no end of enjoyable wickedness, was gone. Just one vast building site. The Soho I knew and spent so much of a profitably indulgent youth in has mostly vanished. The pubs that I once drank in (malodorous and decrepit hovels as they mostly were) are either gone or have been so renovated and improved that I would no longer recognise them. Mark the poetry of the names - the Coach and Horses, the Intrepid Fox, the Porcupine. The Piano Bar, the Cambridge, the White Horse, the Jon Snow, the Star and Garter, the Blue Posts, the Spice of Life. Ah me...the Spice of Life. I must have spent weeks in that pub over the years. How many hundred pints of Snakebite did I drink there? How many brandy chasers? Dear, dead days. And now, they are unrecognisably civilised, those of them that remain.

In some ways, this is good. They were mostly squalid. Unchanged, I dare say I would detest them now. No doubt their patrons would detest me. And I cannot in my heart claim that my Soho, that place of rent boys and predatory queens, tourists and mad tramps, hard-faced whores and out-of towners in search of some unadventurous titillation, sleazy cinema clubs, clip joints, cheap cafes and shabby gay bars, was nice. It wasn't.

So why, I wonder, do I miss it so keenly when the nights draw in?