The Mail and Rod Liddle launch attacks on London

Having been initially “desperate to get back to the anonymous buzz of the city”, Williams was shocked by the Hogarthian visions with which she was confronted upon her return to the city, all of which definitely happened.

Having immediately been confronted by “a woman in a tightly belted coat… screaming in the face of an elderly man cowering in front of her” (“they weren’t ­quarrelling about whose turn it was to unload the dishwasher,” she gathered, astutely) Williams quickly discovered by “the smudged make-up smeared across a pock-marked face covered in sores” that the woman was a sex worker and the man her client. 

“He looked over at me, gave a leering thumbs up. And I walked on,” wrote the shocked Williams.

Just seconds later, Williams spotted “a young woman in high heels” taking delivery of “a package of drugs in a small plastic bag” – although quite how she knew is unclear. “She’d been on her way back home – and the package was what she’d been working for,” tut-tutted our intrepid reporter.

Later she takes a walk (“I inevitably walk, because the Underground has truly gone to pot”) along Edgware Road – an unmissable stop for any tourist to London – but, alas, is confronted with “seemingly ­abandoned churches and ­mysterious ‘self-storage’ depots, where I see piles of dirty rags and sleeping bags filling the doorways, hands and feet poking out”.

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“Staring desolately from the ­window at a field of sheep ­outside the Oxfordshire home we bought six years ago, I ­harboured romantic notions of moving back to the city, bringing up our daughter alongside like-minded parents. She could play with the other cool kids of 40-something mothers while we drank sauvignon,” she laments.

“Too much Motherland and Richard Curtis for me, clearly. Because the London of my memory (or imagination) does not exist, and even in the short year I have been away it has changed beyond recognition.”

Just to check Williams’s views were correct, the Mail ran an online poll, asking its readers, “Has London got worse since YOU last visited?”, although quite how anybody could know how London now is if they’ve not been for a bit is unclear.

Meanwhile, over at the Sunday Times, gorblimey rentagob columnist Rod Liddle has concluded London is “a city of anomie and alienation” after, er, checking into a hotel in the capital last week and finding it had no corkscrew in the room.

“I check into my room and order room service including a half-bottle of wine, because I need to be numbed,” he wrote in the paper at the weekend. “The stuff arrives, but there’s no corkscrew. I ring down for one. They haven’t a clue what I’m talking about. Then a woman comes on and says there’s definitely one in the room. I tell her there isn’t. 

“She says she will send someone up to find it for me. A man arrives. He roots through the utensils in the room’s kitchenette, occasionally holding up items he hopes might be a corkscrew.” 

The story goes on interminably, until our brave columnist finally gets the utensil he craves. “As I was watching the bloke search fruitlessly for an implement he had never heard of in my room, another national newspaper was publishing a first-hand account of a morning in London,” he writes, inevitably eulogising… Amanda Williams’s piece in the Daily Mail.

Still, what might have surprised Liddle’s colleagues is his room service order. A “half-bottle” indeed…