January 1, 2000 – Happy New Year!

I go through all my guidebooks looking for something that is open today. There is not much. British Museum. Closed. Imperial War Museum. Closed. Dickens House. Closed. National Portrait Gallery. Closed. The Museum of the Moving Image is closed until 2003. The BBC is open by appointment, but I only get an answering machine.

Around 1:00 PM, I go to Leicester Square but nothing much is open. Nevertheless there are a lot of people milling around. Leicester Square is the home of London’s half-price ticket booth for the many surrounding theaters. It features a large marble statue of Shakespeare at its center. There is also a fun little statue of Charlie Chaplin as “The Tramp” in bronze.

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The few restaurants that are open have long lines and I wait about 15 minutes for a table at one of them. They seat me in an area that is right in the line of traffic for the waitstaff. It takes a while to get my food then, when it comes, someone walks by my table and knocks my plate to the floor. They bring me another sandwich, but it is noisy and crowded. I leave as soon as I can get my bill.

I walk back to Charing Cross station. The streets, buried in smashed champagne bottles, are a sea of broken glass.

Inside the station, I hear a woman yell, “Thief.” I turn to see a man running up the stairs on another line behind me. A woman is following him close behind. I hear yelling as they continue to run down the corridor. I hope she gets him.

I get off at Victoria station for the “Easy Everything Internet”. Closed. When I get back on the tube, lots of police are standing around; the Victoria line is closed due to a fire alert. I get on the Circle line and come back to the hotel for a nap.

Frank and Carolyn live on a street called The Little Boltons. I love the name of it. I get off at Earls Court. Despite our hotel being in the Earls Court neighborhood when we were here in 1996, nothing looks familiar to me now. Walking along Old Brompton Road, I pass a block of flats called Coleherne Court; the London flat where Lady Diana Spencer lived before she became engaged to Prince Charles!

Carolyn and Frank’s flat is very nice. It is in quite a posh neighborhood. You can tell, Frank says, from the “rolling stock”―Jaguars, Mercedes, Aston Martins―parked in the streets.

They open their New Year’s champagne and share it with me, along with some Beluga caviar. I am touched at the thoughtfulness of this gesture. We chat and sip champagne and look at Carolyn’s digital pictures from the fireworks. They are an amazing quality. For dinner, we go for pizza, one of the few places in the neighborhood that is open.

I am sad to leave these people who I have just gotten to know and like very much. I wish I had more time to spend with them.

• In today’s news: Excerpts from Prince Charles’ message on BBC Radio 4: First Thought for the Day of the New Millennium:

The Millennium provides us with an opportunity to abandon the poles of blind optimism on one hand and total despair on the other, and to rediscover a much older emotion—hope.

As we enter a new Millennium with all its hopes and fears, I pray that we may come to realise that life is a strange paradox and that the art of living it lies in striking a balance, and that it is a sacred thing to compose harmony out of opposites.

Two and half thousand years ago Plato was at pains to explain that the great gift of human rationality should not be disparaged. Far from it, he said, it should be exercised to its utmost, but it must not make the mistake of believing it has no limits.

In an age of secularism, I hope with my heart that in the Millennium we will begin to rediscover a sense of the sacred in all that surrounds…But to do that we must first of all understand that life is a more profound experience than we are told it is.

Perhaps in the midst of all the celebrations and hype, deep down inside, many of us may feel intuitively—to paraphrase a wonderful passage from Dante—that the strongest desire of everything, and the one first implanted by nature, is to return to its source. And since God is the source of our souls, and has made it alike unto himself, therefore this soul desires, above all things, to return to him.