I chose St Pancras to impress him, but he is not impressed. Stumbling off the Eurostar, he barely notices the architecture and thumbs his BlackBerry when I point out the champagne bar. I've prepared this whole historical decompression briefing for him: the match girls' strike, the petrol engine, cinema, Lenin, the Warsaw Pact, the John Betjeman statue. But he stops me short: "I know, I know all ab