Nature can be so spiteful. The fruit trees in the garden, I could tell, were not going to blossom with me staring at them constantly. Last year I was in London for all of March and April and some of the trees bypassed blossom outright, going straight into leaf. They seemed to be willing me to leave London - but what if I went away and missed altogether that soft, Tchaikovsky-ballet backdrop of pale pink and white that sharply whispers romance? Why must the blossom treat me like the rent man or the bailiff?

Is it because, urban to my bones, I like a dual carriageway, I like litter and cigarette butts and a choir of drunks and a bus stop outside my front door? I always suspected nature in the past, fearing it was trying to trip me up in some way or prove I was in the wrong. When I go on walks in the country, which I enjoy because of the chatting, people sometimes raise a hand to stop me talking, then make an open-handed gesture towards the view.

But I am softening. I love a wall of blossom between me and the world, so I took myself away. I went the furthest distance from home I have ever been. “That’ll show you” - my parting remark to the trees.

All my life, perhaps four times a year from the age of seven, people have been telling me how much I would love Buenos Aires. Is everyone told this? It seems unlikely. I knew little about the place, yet the little I did know was alluring. Per head of population, it is said, Buenos Aires has more psychoanalysts than anywhere else in the world. Well, that is not uninteresting to me. The drinking of tea and the eating of cake in the afternoon is taken very seriously. Tick. Tango I am not immune to but when I recently heard it defined as a sad thought made into dance, my heart was stirred, even if I misremembered the phrase as misery on legs.

By the time I finally arrived in Argentina - a day late owing to the general strike and a very unexpected 24-hour hold-up in Montevideo - I was exhausted and braced against the unknown. Perhaps through tiredness (the Montevideo episode was a bit harrowing), I felt a rapid urge to root every new thing I saw in the city in something already known to me. This, perhaps, is the most tiring part of arriving in a new place, the constant drive to translate and redraw the unfamiliar, to tame it and to bring it within your sphere of reference. It is a species of attempted ownership, I expect.

I couldn’t help thinking that a finer person of superior make-up would just allow a place to strike her as fresh, would let a gradual accumulation of impressions and fragments build without constant pesky comparisons colouring everything. But how to stop? A wonderful guide took us round, 26 years in the business, but it was as though his love affair with the city had begun only the night before. Be more like Alejandro, I self-instructed.

In the spectacular Recoleta cemetery I couldn’t help thinking, well it’s a tiny bit like Ferncliff in Westchester USA and a tiny bit like Highgate, the only two cemeteries I know well. Of course it was unlike either, really, but when I was told that the plot next to its special star “guest” Evita Peron was empty and sold last year for $300,000, how could I not think of that little spot next to Judy Garland at Ferncliff, which is also currently unoccupied, although not for sale, as many an avid fan has discovered to his (and it generally is his) chagrin.

In the Alvear Palace Hotel, which I adored, I heard myself concoct an idiotic recipe that said: two parts Madrid Ritz, one part Claridge’s and one part The Carlyle.

Let it be its own city, I kept telling myself. Enough with all the pigeon-holing. The Teatro Colon, though, if you crossed Paris’s OpEra Garnier with Carnegie Hall and - shhh, I pleaded. The splendid opera house, mysterious and wildly atmospheric, had strange boxes below the level of the stalls with cast-iron grilles where society widows once went for the pleasure of hearing opera, without being seen. In the higher levels, where there is room for 500 or so to stand, men and women are still segregated to this day.

Our guide explained that there was a decade early in the 20th century where 12 immigrants arrived for every Buenos Aires native. This came as no surprise. I have been here only 16 hours but I already feel it is the best place I have been. And I couldn’t care less about the trees back home ...

— Financial Times