If you don't think a year in London can change the course of your life, read this

When I was growing up in a small town on the south-east coast of Ireland in the 1950s, London seemed as far away as Samarkand.

- BY JOHN BANVILLE

We had seen it in the movies, of course - The Lavender Hill Mob, The Blue Lamp, The Ladykillers but we knew that was all made up.

The real city had to be seen to be believed. Yet when I went there for the first time as an eager 18-year-old, I was disconcerted. London looked exactly like London. It was only when I lived there that it became a foreign place.

I met a girl in Berkeley, California, in 1968, during what we dubbed the Summer of Assassinations - Robert Kennedy was the most notable casualty- and decided she was the one for me, as I was, it seemed, amazingly, the one for her. We were cautious, though, and decided to give ourselves a year on neutral ground. An aunt died and left me a modest sum, enough for me to quit Dublin and rent a flat in Fulham. On a September midnight my girl arrived in Gatwick on a flight from San Francisco. Each of us, as we confessed later, was worried we would not remember what the other looked like.

Our flat was on the second floor of a corner house in Lillie Road, over what had been a doctor's surgery. We had frequent telephone calls from patients looking to book an appointment. One day, tired of being politely evasive, I said, "Look, I'm sorry, but the doctor is dead." The caller thought this so funny he had to hang up. Londoners do love a laugh.