GRAYDON CARTER

As somebody who loved model trains as a kid, and who took a year off school when he was 20 to work as a lineman for the Canadian National Railway, I got on the GNER train at King's Cross for a trip to the Scottish Borders with a warm sense of familiarity and expectation. The carriages are like old Pullmans, which had a foot of concrete lining their bases to steady the ride and kept the cars upright in case of a derailment. The GNER cars have the smooth, fast ride of an old, comfy Cadillac. The trip to the Borders, an area with one of the world's great set of vistas — following a holiday with my four children in France — was without real distraction save lots of newspapers. Sven! Kimberly! Conrad! Barbara! Cherie! Todd! Todd? Todd — he's a friend who married Nicky Hilton in an early morning ceremony in Las Vegas. The trip from Edinburgh back down to London was on the surface uneventful. But below the surface lurked a family crisis worthy of the detective powers of Tintin. Or Poirot. Or Seinfeld. For when I got to London, I realised I had left a piece of luggage on the train. It contained:

a) my iPod, which a musician friend had loaded up with 3,500 of his favourite songs.

b) my leather diary, which I have used for the past 20 years (not a 'Dear Diary' diary, but a professional one).

c) my working papers.

d) all the rolls of film from our family vacation in France.

I am sure readers can't wait to know what became of the lost bag, but I'll get back to that in a moment.

At the end of summer England and Scotland are, to my mind, about as perfect as you can get. I always seem to see London in bright sunlight. After decades of visiting the city, I can't remember a stretch of slate-grey, rain-drenched days. I'm sure they exist. People do talk. It's just I've never seen them. The hotter weather, which I have noticed over the past few decades, speaks of two words unfamiliar to the English: air conditioning. It was a novelty in America at one point too. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Daisy and co. escape to a movie theatre for the cool air that film houses then offered. An article years ago called 'How Air Conditioning Changed America' stated that without it the South would never have been settled by white, professional Americans after the second world war. Memo to England: for

get the wonders of central heating. Air conditioning is the way of the future.

Ihave come to London to promote a book I've written called What We've Lost. In its simplest form, it's a report card on the four years of the Bush administration. I have been obsessing about the dangers of this administration for a year and a half in the pages of Vanity Fair. At one point during our vacation, my daughter asked, 'Dad, can we please have one dinner without mentioning George Bush?' I said I would try, but I couldn't promise anything. The trouble is that the world is obsessed by, if not terrified of, this ignorant, stubborn man. In the departure lounge at Heathrow on the way back to New York, I see a copy of Time with Bush on the cover. A traveller has sketched in the hair and moustache of Hitler on Bush's photograph. At Harvey Nichols I run into a female movie star. Better than most television pundits, this actress (who grew up in Texas) goes on about the President for, like, 20 minutes. She eventually cools down. But being the keen observer of the human condition that I am, I can tell it's temporary. She's vibrating with hatred for the man.

Go to see David Hare's Stuff Happens, directed by Nicholas Hytner. The play

— about the build-up to the war in Iraq — completely restores my belief in the theatre. In the past couple of years I've gone to plays that are so bad that if they did them in my living room I wouldn't show up. Standing outside the Olivier Theatre having a last smoke before the play, I see a couple I think looks like the playwright Michael Frayn and the writer Claire Tomalin. I don't know Frayn or Tomalin. I've never met them. But way back in the recesses of my mind, I have a vague idea of what they look like. And the Hare play being the obvious cultural moment of the year, I figure that people like Frayn and Tomalin would be there. Moments after I think I spot them, I see another couple that I think looks like Frayn and Tomalin. Then another couple. And another. When I get seated in the Olivier, I look around and I realise that just about every couple looks like them: cultured, middle-aged, and pissed off with Blair.

You're wondering about the luggage, aren't you? A few observations about your country first:

a) London is cleaner and better than you give it credit for.

b) The food is cleaner and better than you give it credit for.

c) Your countrymen are getting fat. And as someone who barely left a morsel behind for the French after two weeks there, I think I know something about fat.

There's another thing: Tony Blair has alienated you from your European allies. A few more years of this and people like Damien Hirst will be pulling up stakes in Notting Hill and opening restaurants in Paris and Frankfurt.

Oh yes, the luggage. On a Saturday morning we make a dozen calls to try to find the bag. All major Great North Eastern Railway offices are closed for the weekend. But we are flying out that night. After many calls, we find a woman in the GNER offices at King's Cross named Nicoletta. She takes the time out to call a colleague named Daniella. Daniella goes through records and finds that our bag has been handed in. Lost luggage at King's Cross says otherwise. Daniella perseveres. Lost luggage weakens in the face of such determination and Daniella gets them to release the bag on a Saturday, rather than a weekday as they are instructed. What a wonderful country. Appreciate everything about it. Especially the trains.