London Calling

London.

This is the city where I live. It's like a huge gaping-mouthed monster that swallows you whole. You’re left to wander its digestive tracts and underground tracks, feeling grubby, bewildered and almost immediately bankrupt. I gave my soul to London years ago. I moved from a small town where the local paper would report ‘thieves steal rake from garden shed’ or ‘glove found in phonebox’. I transplanted my life in the steel-jawed metropolis of seven million souls, this bellicose tumour stretching and engulfing the neighbouring green land, swollen and itching with pregnant dreams.

Very few people here are from here. The cockneys and the pearly kings and queens mostly abandoned the capital over the last century to be replaced with visionaries and chancers from all corners of the world. This enormous melting pot spiced until it bubbled a hundred languages and cultures. Many are seduced by the accelerated rhythms and aching anonymity of the capital. The pace and urgency hits you like a jolt to the heart when you arrive from the sticks- the dirt, the clamour that disconcerting feeling of being invisible, and alive.

Here I can touch my heroes, it’s a musical Narnia. Abbey road is really there! I’ve walked in the footsteps of the Beatles and Hendrix, The Stones and The Kinks. I could walk into a pub to see Amy Winehouse propping up the bar or find Noel Gallagher covered in crumbs in a Hampstead bakery. The gutters and stars rub shoulders here, every borough a mish-mash of fancy townhouses and huge post-war council estates where dogs eat smaller dogs. From the tawdry splendour of Oxford St to the peaceful perfection of Marylebone’s hidden lanes, every time you turn a corner the mood of the capital changes. This is Monopoly for real, although most of us will see more of Whitechapel than we’ll ever see of Mayfair.

Samuel Johnson famously said

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

I wonder if I’ll get tired of London one day or whether it will grow tired of me?