Did I miss out by not choosing London?
A ten-year thought loop.
A part of living on the Thames Estuary is sitting on the train to the city and watching the river change from blue to brown. It’s spilling out with the suits into Fenchurch Street or taking the back exit to be greeted by the Tower of London. Once you blend into the fold, it’s forgetting all thoughts of the domestic as your to-do list is quick to be replaced by another. The commute is your hometown’s artery to work, fun or fortune.
OK, it’s unlikely to be fortune but London has had us punters try our luck for about 2’000 years. When I get in, I like to acknowledge the Roman Wall. Admire medieval Blitz-torn churches that stand proud between gleaming high rises. There are 8.9 million people living in the city but catch its blend of old and new at a fresh angle, and it feels like it’s been laid out just for you.
This is another of its many talents, making you a perpetual tourist, even when you grow up on the outskirts. The creativity is inexhaustive, the people endlessly expressive. Londoners are who they want to be, when they want to be, and diversity is celebrated. The entire world is in London and at the same time, London is the entire world.
All of this to say, it’s easy to wax lyrical about anywhere at a distance. I’m writing this from a country with a population of 8.9 million people, where being expressive is likely to garner noise complaints from your neighbours. Where the history that’s been preserved is mostly pastoral. Switzerland is so stable that it has skipped the cultural explosions that emerge from grit and trauma. Cows are considered exhibits.
I must love it because I came back. It’s the second time I’ve lived here and I’m passionate about ski season, about having the mountains as a permanent backyard. Yet I’m still tethered to London just like my home county of Essex is tethered to its affluence. I crave its variety. I crave its atmosphere. I want to feel my anticipation for what it holds when the train gets in, like a pre-theatre hush. Mostly though, I crave holding a pint with one of my mates outside a pub shabby enough to claim a mention in a Dickens novel.
I did try. I worked in London for two years but for many months of those two years, I was the only one commuting. I worked on an emergency where the city was empty (yes, that one). It’s buildings of old and new were silent. They have lived through far more turbulent and visible threats, but without anyone to admire them, stood stone cold. There was no London life. It was just me and the Roman wall.
And when life slowly did trickle back, I found it frustrating and exhausting. The anonymity and the overwhelm of choice. The endless journeys just to meet a friend for dinner, docking into a harbour of small plates and chat, before having to rush off again. The thought of living with strangers once over and sharing a hob. The fact that you can’t even pass wind in London now without a bloody booking.
There was a shift in priorities after that time and there was a shift in the city too. Fed-up with the ever-rising expenses (my stock index: £7.50 a beer), most I know have moved out or plan to. Empty second homes in central neighbourhoods stand like vortexes in place of those that are desperately needed. Nights out are younger, sticky, awkward. Tops are strappier. People still wear heels. I cannot accept that I have gotten older.
The London window has gone. Or maybe, I’ve just always been looking through it from the other side the whole time. Staying on the fringes, freeloading all of its incredible museums, not quite daring to commit. It didn’t want me anyway, I say to myself when I think about those covid years. It’s overrated, my other friends say, who swerved the city too. All of us are successful on our own terms; each of us acknowledge our careers would have looked different in the big smoke.
I swapped the Thames for a lake on my commute, but I will always be drawn to both, just as the water where I grew up is pulled by the moon. When the tide is out, the horizon is silt, stones and knots of seaweeds. Container ships the size of Lego pass to the city on a strip of water that’s kilometres out. There’s the faint honk of a train. London is always present, London is never too close.
On the beach, those that are brave put on their mud shoes and make their way out to sea.
