london town - for starters

I’ve always pictured London as perpetually stuck in the industrial revolution. I can only see the grimy brick warehouses and the rows and rows of blackened chimney stacks. I see street urchins picking the pockets of tailcoats, and shoe makers stores. And roses, two blooms for a penny. Then I think of England in its entirety, and it’s the rolling green hills and spotted cows on misty mornings, and a farmer in wool trousers and a brown hat. These images seem hard to reconcile with catching a gaudy purple coach from the airport to Victoria station.

We drive through the English countryside from the airport – budget travellers get the scenic route, whether or not we please – and I’m pleased to report it’s everything I expected. Trees sit squat in the mist. They’re greener than I’m used to, and everything about them is healthy fat. The sky is British grey.

Here, the strange and the familiar meet and merge. We’re on the left side of the road again, but we travel in miles per hour. The bus driver speaks English, but not the kind I’m used to.

I have an Australian friend who lives in Putney. She shares house with four other Australians, and with us there for the weekend it’s seven. We tag along to a party and meet more Australians, two Kiwis, and a South African. The only British accents I encounter all weekend are behind sales counters and the windscreens of red double-decker buses. My uncontrollable thrill at the big red buses notwithstanding, it’s an underwhelming introduction to the British-ness of the folk in my new home.

Central London is carpeted with people. From third storey windows the pavements look patterned with motion, like the paint that changes colour in the light. We play people games; we play sardines on the tube and we play follow the leader when the streets are too packed for us to walk abreast.

The masses suit my vision of the grotty and overpopulated London town, though there’s a notable lack of top hats and children seem to be in school rather than sooty factories. There are stained chimney stacks and rows of town houses in identical streets. But then there’re great glass offices and glittering shopping malls, and there’s the big blue Eye, watching over it all like the Eye of Sauron. It's London like I imagined, brought forward and assimilated into the twenty-first century.

My big trip is over, but life is beginning. I cleaned three months worth of tickets from my wallet. 

We live temporarily in Finchley with charitable souls and pretty faces. We hang out at the milk bar for free WiFi and cheerful English company.

I already love this place. Even things I hate are given novel charm.

I hate the cold. I’ve always hated it, and I’m convinced I always will. It instils this sinking feeling in my bones, in my very soul, like the world will never be warm again, and nor will I. The only thing that can make cold worse is grey drizzle. And I don't love crowds, or daily bustle, or people breathing on me on public transport.

But I’m in love with the griminess, the history, and the streets lined with theatres. I like shiny wet pavement. I even kind of like walking in great slow funeral marches through the tube stations at peak hour with briefcases bumping my knees and their scarves up my nose.

I think the weather will grow on me.