Just got back from London, my first visit there in almost 25 years, and yes it’s true: the food sure is a lot better. Of course the last time I was there I wasn’t exactly flush (I remember being in Hyde Park, literally sitting on my last pound) and could not have afforded a good meal if there was one to be had. But there wasn’t. This time my wife and I had at least one great meal at an Asian fusion place in Piccadilly called Cocoon that looked and sounded like someting out of Layer Cake: all youth and electronica, complete with girls getting completely hammered and guys trooping off to the men’s room to do coke — what year is it, anyway?

I arrived in time to enjoy the news of the Libby indictment, which was almost as big a deal there as it was here. All the papers put it on the front page Saturday and only the drumbeat about “nannystate” — the proposals to ban smoking in pubs and drinking on the tube — drove it off. People there hate Bush almost as much as we do.

I can’t make generalizations about anyplace I visited for a weekend but I can say that where the last time I felt at times that I was in a third world country, that this time I felt like the poor relation. The dollar is so weak that taking cabs there was absurdly expensive and if you tried to do anything — shop, eat, even browse — while doing the math you would drive yourself insane. (My friend Jess said that she and her family got through a recent visit there by simply pretending that the numbers meant dollars, not pounds. Then it just seems like New York.) Best to just act like an American and avoid thinking about tomorrow.

Or whenever it is the bills arrive.