It would be wrong to call Kathmandu attractive, although it possesses undoubted charm, because it is, in fact, quite a desperate place. For example, the city, like the country, is hopelessly mal-administered. But while the rest of the country is emptying of migrants, many going abroad, Kathmandu is filling with them, from the rest of the country. It’s a mess; and in this, and the things which cause it, and the things it entails, it’s nothing unusual.

I came here as a journalist to cover the Maoist war. I hadn’t given the place a moment’s thought before that, and I didn’t expect to stay more than a couple of years. Now, arguably middle-aged, I realise it’s been the scene of most of my adult life.

I was immediately affected by what seemed to me the romance of its society, and in this I was influenced by various circumstances besides youth at the time. I had studied history: social and political history, and then architectural. So I’d been trained to try swallow the city whole.

Or, I was primed to see its current churning as a great historical drama. What distinguishes Kathmandu is that it is an ancient capital, and also a small town, which has been transformed into an unmanageable conurbation in the last few decades. This is long enough for a great deal of turbulence, and the obliteration of the city as it had been preserved until recently by its isolation. But it’s only the same length of time as a man’s career, and there’s been great continuity among the people who have careers. What you see seems to be the last stand, but is only the latest iteration of everything that has gone before.

A friend who’d been here gave me an address before I arrived, so I happened to rent rooms in an old part of the city. I was astonished by the intricacy of the buildings, and of the pattern of passages and squares. I was attracted by the constant round of festivals, either spectacular or tiny. I was deeply impressed by the monuments, and traditions which — I read — were in many cases almost frozen in time in the late 18th century, when the Shah dynasty conquered the city and forged today’s Nepal (replacing the city-kings around whom the festivals had developed).

Now, in their turn, the Shahs and their class were battling ‘bourgeois democrats’ in Kathmandu and Maoist guerrillas in the countryside.

I adored the hard-drinking, occasionally riotous nightlife in the ground-floor rooms of houses that sold rice beer and moonshine, and small bars where someone knew the owner, and dance bars, and hotels and parties. It was partly my age, but I think Kathmandu was quite wild during the conflict, when there was no taboo or sanction against drunk driving.

The better I understood it, I was absorbed in what seemed to me the byzantine quality of everything: the family connections, the gossip, the rumours, the jockeying, the factions, the strategies. It’s undoubtedly a weakness in a reporter not to be a ferocious networker, but in a village like Kathmandu even I can be better plugged into a web of connections than anyone is in the British city where I was born; and, although I tend to think that such processes are not the best way to govern a city, I find this life compelling and partly appealing.

These are some of the things I find most particular about the city, and are among the reasons I’m attracted to it. The reason I still live here is not necessarily to do with any of them, but rather the fact that I met my wife here and it’s where she’s from. We talk about moving sometimes, but so far it hasn’t happened.

I’m still fascinated by the place and it excites me. I’m arguably a little obsessed with it. But in this, in my different way, I may not be at odds with many of Kathmandu’s original inhabitants. Everyone is painfully aware of the exodus of middle-class children to study abroad and that they never come home. But there are also many who could leave but don’t, who are in love with their hometown. It’s conventional for such people to lament ‘the chaos’, but sometimes they celebrate it, and I think they’re hooked on how things go.

Eventually it happens, if you’ve lived in a place long enough — if it has the things you’re interested in, if most of what’s important to you is there, and when ever-more of your friends and your memories are there — that city becomes a habit, which is to say you’ve made your home and it’s too difficult to think about moving, at least for a while longer.

Thomas Bell is the author of Kathmandu

(In this monthly series, authors chronicle the cities they call home.)

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