All roads to London's glorious, often colourful past lead back to the Piccadilly portals of its social doyen - The Ritz.

It's the song that instantly springs to mind. Conjuring images where penury plays no part, champagne is sipped from receptacles normally worn on the feet, and swathed in feathers and silks, Coopers, Mitfords, Asquiths, and Windsors glide without earthly care around the dance floor amidst tables lit by the incandescent glow of cinematically perfect lamps. Ah, The Ritz - where fashion fits...

Several intervening decades, a particularly nasty airline voyage and a train transfer from Hades later, I arrived at The Ritz. A rather flustered and sweaty, browned bundle with 67 kg of unspeakably obese luggage, dirty Levi's, scuffed cowboy boots and the three strands of pseudo-gold designer chains - the one remaining concession to the South of France mode de vie I had enjoyed and attempted to appropriate for the previous 4 weeks - were most inelegantly tangled in hair that did not so much peek stylishly from under my new chapeau as it did glare maniacally in quite psychotic abandon. As first impressions go, mine was better viewed from Dover. A good two hundred kilometres away.

And yet, as the famous Piccadilly portals loomed closer and closer, I felt strangely comforted. 'Take me to the Ritz, please', I had said boldly to the taxi driver who exercised some well documented class distinction and given the less than regal state of my sartorial art, obviously believed me to have ideas well beyond my manifest station. This worried me as we motored through central London bound for the legendary hotel that is held in Her Majesty's highest esteem and is precious in the hearts and minds of a good deal of the English public.