There was once a very good film called Breaking Away about a working-class boy in Bloomington, Indiana, who yearned to be Italian. He sat for hours in his bedroom practising the guitar and playing records of Italian opera. He invented an Italian character for himself, and he successfully wooed a college girl by singing her Italian love songs.

It seems to me that many people in England share that young man’s identity problem. They may not specifically want to be Italian, but they want to be like continental Europeans, with all the sophistication and panache that they imagine foreigners to have. Even those who are Eurosceptical in matters political privately resent their Englishness, because they think it makes them seem clumsy, bovine and provincial.

Actor Dennis Christopher in a scene from Breaking Away.

One way they show their envy of the glamorous continentals is by a feigned interest in foreign food. They actually like sausages and baked beans best, but they pretend to prefer anything of exotic origin. This weakness is ruthlessly exploited by restaurateurs, who not only charge them too much for dishes that they do not particularly like, but also try to intimidate them with fancy menus.

It is customary for London restaurants to include in the description of any dish at least one word that customers will find incomprehensible. This undermines their self-confidence, and makes them even easier to fleece. What, for example, is a "duo of beef"? A pair of matching steaks? I saw this on the menu of one elegant restaurant this week, and I don’t think anyone can have known what it meant.

The same restaurant provided "sun-blushed tomatoes" (how do you blush a tomato?) and something it called a "tian" of Cornish crab. The word "tian" doesn’t feature in my complete Oxford Dictionary, though it could, I suppose, be an ancient Cornish expression for something. Perhaps it is simply the Cornish word for "tin", or perhaps the restaurant inserted the letter "a" into the word "tin" to disguise the fact that the crabmeat came out of one.

It could, on the other hand, have been a misprint or a misspelling, since these appear frequently on the menus of even the most expensive London restaurants, showing how idle or ignorant some of these restaurateurs really are. The restaurant cited above also offered "mille fueille" [sic] of chargrilled vegetables, accompanied by "buffalo mozzarello" [sic].

In another very posh restaurant I went to the other day, the starters included figs with "prosciutto San Danielli", whereas this Italian ham is, of course, called San Daniele. (Even the famous hotel in Venice is called Danieli and not Danielli.) And nearly all restaurants seem to have problems with the Italian dried beef called bresaola – during the past week, I have seen it spelled both as "braseola" and as "bresola". Why bother to serve it if you can’t spell it? I doubt if many people order it, anyway.

As part of the growing continentalisation of the English, new research reveals that the young are now 50% more extrovert than they were in the 60s. But not only the young – the newspapers have been covering the interesting case of the five- foot-five-inch, 53-year-old businessman Richard Davis, who has been suing, among others, the Camden and Islington Health Authority, for prescribing him drugs that turned him from a "shy virgin" into a "deranged sex maniac".

At the time of writing, the court has yet to decide on whether to award Mr Davis the millions of pounds in damages he wants. But lawyers for the other side have disputed his claim that, until he started taking the drugs for a non-malignant tumour, he had never done anything more exciting than occasionally play bridge and drink the odd glass of wine.

They have said that even before that he had been rather more flamboyant. He had owned a lilac Triumph Stag sports car, a BMW and a personalised numberplate worth more than £2,000. Maybe there were already Italian stirrings within him before the drugs, as he maintains, turned him from a responsible publisher of trade magazines into "a highly over-excited teenager" who frequented "hostess clubs" and spent "thousands of pounds every day" on presents for girls and natty clothes for himself. He even varnished his fingernails and wore a gold neck chain.

Mr Davis is now a bankrupt with a criminal record, though, judging from his photographs, a reformed character who wears a conventional double-breasted business suit and tie. Whatever the outcome of his case, it is yet another reminder that there is a lot to be said for the traditional English qualities of dinginess and reticence. We should leave the showing off to the Italians.

Here in New York I have been put in charge of a small tropical fish. Its owner has gone to Los Angeles to organize Vanity Fair’s annual Oscars party and won’t be back until the end of the month. Her parting instructions were minimal. I was just asked to sprinkle a little fish food on it from time to time. That was all. I wasn’t told how much food to give it or how often (if at all) to change its water.

I have never looked after a fish before, and everyone tells me it is a difficult task. For example, fish do not know how to stop eating: if you give them too much food, they burst. And changing a fish’s water is a delicate operation. Not only is the fish easily lost in the process, but the water has to be the right temperature or it may die. It may well die anyway, of course. Fish usually do.

This fish has so far contented itself with occasionally pretending to be dead. At other times it is quite frisky. But it has very little space to be frisky in. Its home is a square glass jar on the top of the desk–so small and square that it cannot even do circles. A visitor to the office the other day said he thought that its owner should be charged with fish abuse. But I don’t suppose he knows any more about fish than I do, and the size of the jar is probably just right for a fish of this particular kind.

It is not a colorful fish. In fact, it is completely black. But it is curious to look at, having several seemingly superfluous fins almost as big as its little body. It’s a bit like several fishes stuck together. This appearance suggests rarity–and therefore considerable expense if it should die and have to be replaced before its owner returns from Hollywood. Maybe it is a million-dollar fish and we will have to sell the house in London.

When I aired this anxiety to Chris Garrett, the managing editor of Vanity Fair, she told me a cautionary tale about a dog that was flown recently from Europe to New York to be re-united with its lady owner. It traveled in a crate in the hold, but turned out on arrival to be dead. The airline staff could not face the idea of presenting the owner with a corpse, so they rang her to say that her dog was now arriving on a later flight and spent the time thus gained searching the pet shops of New York for one that looked the same.

Returning triumphant from their mission, they replaced the dead dog in the crate with a living one and told the owner that her dog was now ready for collection from the airport. When she arrived and saw it she shrieked and then fainted. Her dog had died in Europe, and she had been bringing it home for burial. There is little relevance in this story to my dilemma, but I was much amused to hear it.

I suspect that fish anxiety is widespread. In the 1980s, when President Reagan was about to hold his first ever meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Switzerland, he rented a villa from the Aga Khan on the shore of Lake Geneva. One of the Aga Khan’s children had left a note in the house asking him to keep an eye on the goldfish. At the appointed time, the President’s Chief of Staff, Donald Regan, came by to pick him up and take him to the historic summit.

He found Mr. Reagan standing gravely in front of the fish tank. “Don, we’ve got a problem,” he said. One of the goldfish was lying dead on the bottom. So, as the peace of the world hung in the balance, members of the President’s staff were urgently dispatched to find a replacement. If only the fish in my care were a humble goldfish, instead of this strange, multi-finned specimen, I would have rather less to worry about.

In case you are wondering how I find myself in this situation, the answer is that I am spending a month in New York working at Vanity Fair, thanks to the kindness of its editor, Graydon Carter. By the time you read this, he and all of his senior staff will have gone to Hollywood for the great Oscars extravaganza. It is the most popular party of the year, and Mr. Carter writes in the current issue of his magazine that he has been besieged by people angling for invitations.

I haven’t been one of them, though. I am perfectly happy where I am; and anyway, I have an onerous duty to perform here in New York.

2.

The worst possible thing has happened. The fish in my care in New York has died. A day after I filed my column last weekend about the stress involved in looking after somebody else’s fish, the little creature snuffed it. This wasn’t my fault, I promise. An assistant to Sara Marks, the fish’s owner, who is away in Los Angeles organizing the Oscars party for Vanity Fair, took it to the coffee alcove to change the water in its glass jar, and I followed him there to get myself a cup of coffee. I saw him pour the fish into a cardboard coffee cup, change its water in the sink, and then pour it back into the jar.

I don’t know whether the water was too cold or too hot, or whether he decanted the fish too roughly, but it dived headfirst into the gravel at the bottom of the jar and expired. I have yet to speak to Ms. Marks, the Director of Special Projects at Vanity Fair whose office I am temporarily occupying, but I gather she is not well pleased. She is said to be particularly distressed that nobody had the courage to tell her what had happened for a couple of days. She had had the fish for a year, which is quite a long time, so she has every reason to feel a little upset. However, I have decided against looking for a replacement, since I have grown convinced that people oughtn’t to keep fishes in their offices, especially when they are not there.

For some reason, the dead fish was returned to my desk in its jar, where it remained for a day upside down with its nose in the gravel, slowly changing color. A day later, when I was beginning to wonder whether I shouldn’t give it a formal burial somewhere, perhaps in Central Park, I returned from lunch to find it gone. To my surprise I slightly miss it. The good thing about a dead fish is that it is the antithesis of the Buzz. There is nothing “hot” about a dead fish. And since New York is ruled by the Buzz and “hotness”, there is something rather comforting in that. I even kept its death secret for a while, like countries with dictators do when their leaders have died, just to enjoy the peace of being with something dead.

Vanity Fair, where I am working this month, became the citadel of Buzz when Tina Brown edited it and has maintained, even strengthened, that position under the editorship of Graydon Carter. The current issue devoted to Hollywood and the Oscars is the biggest ever published, an enormous thing stuffed with advertisements and photographs of celebrities. It is symptomatic of the Buzz that I don’t recognize half of them. The Buzz is as restless as a firefly. No sooner has it declared one person “hot” than it switches its allegiance to someone else.

Bars and restaurants seem to have a longer life in the Buzz. The king of Buzz in the restaurant world is Keith McNally, the British cockney lad who has somehow discovered how to tickle New York’s belly and drive it crazy. A friend of mine wanted to go downtown the other day to experience his new “hot” restaurant Pastis. I said it was pointless even to think about it, but we telephoned the restaurant all the same and were told by a very welcoming voice that it didn’t take reservations but would be delighted to see us if we dropped by. When we got there, an enormous bouncer blocking the entrance said it would be at least two hours before we would even be allowed inside as far as the bar, so great was the crush. A seat at a table would obviously be out of the question.

Of course you can book at Pastis. That is the only way anyone ever gets in. The claim that it doesn’t take reservations is a cruel pretense. It recognizes a secret hierarchy of “hotness” among its clientele that makes even a restaurant as fashionable as The Ivy in London seem open and democratic. Last night I ate at Balthazar in SoHo, another McNally restaurant where people kill for a table. It was packed and buzzing loudly. I have no idea how a table was obtained, but I went with some savvy New Yorkers who must know how this awful freemasonry works.

An even deeper mystery is what makes one restaurant so much “hotter” than another. Keith McNally’s specialty is the French bistro. He finds a good location, does it up agreeably with lots of old mirrors and other fixtures imported from France, has “Buvez” and “Mangez” printed in faded gold letters on the glass doors, and serves bistro food like steak frites. Then comes the stampede. The sad thing is that I know that if I did exactly the same thing no one would come at all.

March 2000

I am much embarrassed to reveal that in 60 years I have never tried pot. I remember about 30 years ago being at a supper party in Rome when the person next to me at table passed me what I thought was a lit cigarette. I have always been very fond of cigarettes, but not of the damp, half-smoked ones of people I donÕt know. I thought this one looked unhygienic and might carry some disease.

All the same, not wanting to be rude, I accepted the cigarette and took a small puff. I was immediately revolted by its sickly smell and hastily passed it on, realising that the stuff inside it was obviously not tobacco but marijuana. I resolved never to touch the weed again, and until this week, it was one of the few resolutions I have ever kept. But the Sunday Telegraph has been my downfall. With the bait of a luxury suite in Blakes, Anouska Hempel’s snazzy new hotel in Amsterdam, it persuaded me to spend a night of depravity in the cannabis capital of the world.

Knowing practically nothing about the drug I consulted the American National Institute of Drug Abuse, which has a page on its website entitled “Marijuana: Facts Parents Need to Know”. “Marijuana is a green, brown, or gray mixture of dried, shredded leaves, stems, seeds of the hemp plant (Cannabis sativa),” it began. “All forms of cannabis are mind-altering (psychoactive) drugs; they all contain THC (delta-9-tetrahydricannabinol). MarijuanaÕs effect on the user depends on the strength or potency of the THC it contains.”

So, come what may, my mind would be altered; but how was I to know which of the hundreds of kinds of cannabis legally available in Amsterdam would be the safest for me to try? “At all costs, you should avoid “skunk,” said one of my godsons. “It is ten times stronger than ordinary hash and has names like AK47 and Mindblaster.” Being an ecologically-aware young person, he also disapproved of “skunk” because it was genetically modified and grown in greenhouses. So I should go instead for “weed” (African bush weed, they might call it).

And how would that alter my mind? “It could make you a bit paranoid,” was the reply. “It can make you think everybody thinks your stoned. Also, your eyes can go bloodshot. And it can make you thirsty and crave sweet things ‹ this is called having the “munchies”. But it can enhance creativity.” Martin Amis, when I bumped into him at a party last week, didn’t agree. It would probably just make me want to go to my hotel room and watch television, he said.

When I called my daughter Cecilia to ask her for advice, she just said: “Dad, don’t drink too much.” Others had already told me that it was bad to drink alcohol before smoking a joint, it could make you pass out ‹ but Cecilia may just have been reflecting a commonly-held view among the young that drinking is generally much worse for people than pot-smoking. She also knows that I am a traditionalist whose vices are of the old-fashioned kind.

The Sunday Telegraph had said that I could take a companion with me to Amsterdam, and I chose my older brother John, another traditionalist but much less fearful than me of new experiences. He is also a gregarious fellow who doesn’t mind whom he engages in conversation, a quality I thought could be useful in the many coffee shops of Amsterdam, which I had imagined (wrongly, as it turned out) would be full of rather scary characters.

What the Dutch call “coffee shops” are the places where cannabis is legally bought and consumed. They look outwardly like ordinary cafes and in most respects are. But they are also shrines to the culture of cannabis, with countless varieties on sale for consumption on or off the premises. You make your choice from “menus” – books even heavier and grander than the wine lists of expensive restaurants – in which hundreds of kinds of the noxious substance are listed, with photographs or even actual samples of them glued to the pages beside their names.

Amsterdam is probably how Ann Widdecombe imagines Hell. Tolerance of soft drugs is not “zero” there, but absolute. Anybody can legally possess up to 500 grammes of cannabis, a whopping amount. They can grow it in their window boxes. They can buy it in shops. They can smoke it in the street. The only places where it is not welcome are normal bars, cafes and restaurants where cigars and cigarettes still reign supreme.

Whatever the bad effects of soft drug legalisation, it has certainly achieved one thing. It has banalized cannabis. There is no glamour in taking it any more. You can ask anybody in the street where to find the nearest coffee shop, and even the solidest citizen will give you directions in a matter-of-fact way. Yet only this week the European Union revealed that many more 15 and 16-year-old children use cannabis in Britain, where it is an offence, than do in Holland, where it is not, 37.5 per cent here compared to 31.1 per cent there. The banalization may have something to do with it.

When we arrived from the airport at Blakes, I asked one of “the young, elegant staff clad in black designer suits” (I quote from the hotel’s publicity material) whether I could order cannabis from room service. He looked a little surprised, but said he was sure it would be possible. However, we thought we would waste no time and took a taxi to the first recommended coffee shop on our list, the Bluebird.

This was the beginning of a long coffee shop crawl during which many joints were smoked, so my memory has suffered a little. But the Bluebird was in what appeared to be a very respectable quarter of old Amsterdam. There was nothing about it to suggest decadence apart from a notice in the window saying that children under 18 were not allowed inside. There was a comfortable room with a bar upstairs in which three or four men with ear-rings or long hair were puffing away rather dolefully.

The person in charge was a pale young man with magnificent hair like the wig of King Charles II. I approached him at the bar and told him I was new to this game and needed advice before getting started. “Have you never had cannabis before?” he asked, without any show of surprise. “No, I haven’t,” I said. “Well I will tell you what I always say to first-timers,” he said. “Do not be surprised if it does nothing for you at all. You may feel good, but on the other hand, you may feel nothing.”

I secretly liked the idea of feeling nothing, but feared that the Sunday Telegraph might be disappointed. “What should I do if I feel nothing?” I asked. “Try something stronger?” “No, I don’t think that would be wise,” he replied. “Just come back tomorrow and keep trying. You’ll feel something in the end.” But we had only 24 hours in Amsterdam; so if I was going to feel anything, it had better be sooner than that.

The man rolled two joints, one for me and one for my brother. Mine was called Moroccan Pollen, I think, but I didn’t know what John’s was. All I knew was that they were both supposed to be mild. Then we sat side by side on a sofa while the photographer Andy Hall, who had accompanied us from London, started snapping away at us with his camera. I hold Andy largely responsible for the coughing fit that followed. Like all professional photographers, he wanted to take endless photographs of the same scene ‹ in this case, of me lighting my joint with a cigarette lighter and inhaling ostentatiously.

He made me repeat the same performance again and again in rapid succession until the inside of my mouth felt as if somebody had been at it with a cheese grater, my throat was sore and dry, and my coughing was brutally puncturing the woozy, dream-like atmosphere into which the other customers had settled. “How do you feel?” Andy asked. “Not tremendously good,” I said.

John, meantime, was doing rather better. “I feel quite agreeable,” he reported. Then, after little while, he became silly. “It’s delightful here,” he said. “This place sums up the whole world. The whole world is in here.” I looked around. Three Russians from New York, a young man and two girls, one of them rather pretty, had joined us on our sofa.

The pictures on the walls were of frogs and crocodiles and fairies, suggesting psychedelic visions. A blond man with an ear-ring and an evil-looking smile was standing goofily against the wall. But in every other respect the Bluebird looked to me like a pretty ordinary caf/. Having taken against my own joint, I borrowed John’s and started to feel happier. I asked the man with the Charles II hair what it contained. “Skunk,” he said. “Oh, no! Not skunk!” “It’s very weak skunk,” he assured me.

We decided to move on to another coffee shop up the street called Happy Hour, which had a sign outside it offering “Smokes and Jokes”. The boss of Happy Hour, who said he was called Haile and came from Surinam, rolled us “white widows”, whatever they are, to a background of loud reggae music. Then he joined us at a table for a chat.

Haile was an amiable chatterbox. He started expounding on the art of using cannabis. “You don’t just smoke it. You don’t just inhale it. It’s an art, a way of life. You have to live it. You have to be it. That’s the secret.” John was beginning to look as if he’d mastered the secret. I certainly had not. I was beginning to think I would like to go to my hotel room and watch television. But that was not to be.

There was a final coffee shop on our list, the Grasshopper, which had been suggested to us as an example of a large establishment, unlike the cosy little places we had visited so far. As we walked there, I found myself feeling rather giddy and tottering a bit. I wasn’t enjoying what I imagine to be a “high”, but at least I wasn’t feeling nothing.

The Grasshopper was lacking in any charm ‹ just a large underground room in which dozens of dull-looking people sat at rows of tables arranged in tiers all facing the bar, as if it were a cinema screen It was midnight and I had had enough, so we found a Spanish restaurant still open in the Red Light district and ate Spanish omelettes before going to bed. I was too tired to watch television.

Next morning, to my surprise, I was feeling fine. Before leaving for the airport, we paid a visit to The Hash Marijuana Hemp Museum on a pretty old canal street beside the Sensi Seed Bank Grow Shop for grow-your-own enthusiasts. Containing, among much else, a live indoor marijuana garden, this peculiar museum devotes one display to Queen Victoria’s medicinal use of the plant and another to the notorious British drugs smuggler Howard Marks, whose story, it says, is “full of excitement, humour and charm”.

According to the museum, cannabis use is very old indeed. In 450 BC, Herodotus apparently wrote about the pleasures of the “cannabis bath” and the billows of steam and smoke it produced. “No Greek vapour bath can in any way surpass it,” he maintained. “The Scythians howl with joy when having a cannabis bath.

I would like to try one.

October, 2000

There were strong reasons for thinking this, because she not only met her future husband in Houston, Texas, the city that pioneered the breast transplant, but she did so as a stripper in Rick’s Cabaret, the most famous topless bar in Houston. Everything I know about Rick’s comes from an enormously long article, which I read five years ago in the Texas Monthly, entitled “Silicone City: The rise and fall of the implant – or how Houston went from an oil-based economy to a breast-based economy”.

“No two products were more interdependent than Rick’s and the implant,” the article said. Its owner, Robert Watters, a Canadian lawyer with a degree from the London School of Economics, told the magazine, “In the early and mid-80s, the first material acquisition the dancers saved for was breast augmentation.” But it seems that Smith was lucky and didn’t need it.

A brief history of silicone implants … Silicone was first used after the second world war, when Japanese women, normally smaller-breasted than American women, had it injected into their breasts to please American servicemen. Then, in 1962, a woman called Timmie Jean Lindsay became the first woman in the world to receive a silicone-gel implant: married at 15 and divorced at 30, after bringing six children into the world, she was in hospital in Houston to have tattoos removed from her breasts when the surgeon asked if she would like to have them made more shapely at the same time. Her answer was yes, and with that there was born a multibillion-dollar industry. Throughout the US, breast augmentation rapidly became a female obsession. One Houston celebrity doctor had already performed between 2,500 to 3,000 implants by 1995. He and his colleagues found their incomes rising from the low six figures up to $2 million a year. And even after 1990, when panic erupted about the side-effects of what had been promoted as a cheap, safe operation, there were millions more to be earned, not only by lawyers but by doctors for taking out the bags of silicone they had put in.

Research by America’s most illustrious medical institutions failed to prove that there was any more illness among women who had had breast implants than among those who hadn’t, but the huge awards given by juries to plaintiffs were sufficient to bankrupt the country’s principal implant manufacturer – and to burst the implant bubble, as it were. Nevertheless, the implant craze had amazing staying power. It survived the fashion for skinny models, and would probably be going as strong now, if it were not for anxiety about the health side-effects.

Trying to explain the phenomenon, the Houston inventors of the silicone-gel implant, Thomas Cronin and Frank Gerow, wrote in the early 60s that it was perhaps “due in large measure to the tremendous amount of publicity which has been given to some movie actresses blessed with generous sized breasts. Many women with limited development of the breasts are extremely sensitive about it”. Women who have undergone the operation usually say they wanted to increase their “self-esteem”. But it seems to be all the fault of men, really – of men such as J Howard Marshall II, the master of an immense oil fortune, who, although 89 years old and confined to a wheelchair, went regularly to Rick’s at lunchtime to drool over the generously proportioned body of Anna Nicole Smith.

Anna, the small-town girl from Mexia, Texas, who dreamt from childhood of being Marilyn Monroe, believes she understands this: “Most men, I think, like a womanly figure.” The feminist campaign against the treatment of women as sex objects seems to have completely passed her by, and she is $449 million richer as a result. “Are you a feminist?” she was once asked. “I don’t understand the question,” she replied. “Do you fight for women’s rights?” “Whoever started that, I could kick them in the head.” But Anna is a religious person. “What’s heaven like?” she was asked. “I think heaven’s a beautiful place. Gold. You walk on gold floors.” It looks as if she might be there already.