London :: UK
The Home Office decides it's time for me to go home.
Places: London
Coolest thing I did: Spent the last night living it up in the Waldorf. It's been a long time since I stayed somewhere and been called 'sir'.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: London can still snow like it's 1991. I personally blame global warming.
It’s somehow fitting for your last day in London of have the soggy consistency of a chewed up cigar butt. If you averaged out the weather in London whilst I’ve been living in the city then cold, constant drizzle would probably be the closest possible. In a week that saw a couple of days with weather more suited to Switzerland than the South East of England it was a better reminder of the time here. Luckily, I was never here for the weather.
In both the weeks I’ve been back here (with the exception of that week out in The Real England) I’ve spent a fairly large chunk of my time wandering around various parts of the city and looking back through the photos on my camera I have been muy touristico. That was never my intention, I guess now that I’m faced with the fact that I will very likely not be back to this city I’ve called home on and off for almost a decade I wanted to just get out and feel the texture of it under my feet again. I don’t doubt I’ll be back one day, as this place has had a disproportionate effect on who I am, but I might be quite old by then.
I have actually been surprised at the places I’ve ended up, some of which I never thought necessary to visit even when I was last living here. The jaunt through the pubs around Hammersmith and Brook Green opened up a whole lot of important memories for me, as the year I spent living in an over-crowded house of Aussies on Blythe Road was probably one of the happiest years of my life. Even though it’s gentrified out of sight in Ws 6 & 12 in the intervening 6 years the memories still lurk around every corner, just waiting to jump out at you. I imagine walking around Dublin or Toronto would be very similar experiences.
The Mayor of London recently likened reading the Financial Times to spending an hour with a doomsday suicide cult and you do get a far greater feeling of depression here than has been true watching the collapse of global finance from the warmth of a Sydney summer. Walking down from Liverpool Street into the heart of the city feels a bit like visiting the ruins of a defeated empire, some of the flashier bars and restaurants are empty, even on Thursday lunchtime. Some are even shuttered for good. That’s not something you would have seen a couple of years ago. Even if it is just a mood, something that may not be reflecting the actual facts you do feel the London of the Russian Oligarchs and the Hedge Fund managers may have been and gone, with what’s replacing it more suited to grey skies and cold rain. I’m still waiting to watch them burn the chairmen of HBOS and Barclays at the stake at Charring Cross, but I might have to leave before that happens.
The fact I’m thinking like this makes me believe I’ve been watching the BBC too much since I got back.
As I said, I was never here for the weather. London over the last decade has been incredibly good to me, and through my tastes in nightlife may have morphed from Walkabouts and super clubs to gastropubs and proper food this is a city that still has a variety that hasn’t been matched by practically any other city I’ve been to (the only possible exception being New York). No matter what you’re into, be it art, culture, nightlife, food, poetry readings, whatever it’s possible to find it here. (OK, I admit if you’re into wind surfing that may be a bit of a stretch…). If I have one complaint to make about returning to Sydney over the last 6 months it’s been how completely stagnant it feels, as if no one has had an idea and opened a new pub or restaurant in the last 5 years. I know that’s not 100% fair, but compared to how constantly shifting London’s scene is Sydney may as well be the same as it was when I was at Uni.
Visitors to this great city often go looking for the traditional, trudging around in the grey rain, looking at grey buildings, eating grey food and drinking warm beer. You know, in search of The REAL London. The trouble is, the real London for me is the living one, the one that can accommodate both the British Museum and a tiny gallery in Bethnel Green displaying pictures of pierced eyebrows to the sound of whale song. That’s the same London that can serve up fish and chips in a pub that hasn’t seen a lick of paint since the 1940s as one that dishes up food from every country in the world, and some that are found nowhere else and quite often at prices found nowhere else. It’s the same city where you can find old me in flat caps grumbling about football into their pints of warm beer in a pub named after the head of some dead royal right around the corner from private clubs filled with mass produced Eastern European models still angling for a partner from that rapidly shrinking pool of bonus-fuelled City boys. It’s simply a city like no other, one you couldn’t re-create if you tried.
This is why I’m in two minds about my Home Office-incompetence-enforced exile from this great land. This city has been very good to me, offering me somewhere ever impressive to live combined with the money and location to travel far beyond what I could have achieved had I never left Sydney. I’ve always maintained that I’d always return to Sydney one day, but the trouble is, that one-day has always been at least 12 months down the road. Perhaps this is that push I may have required to try my hand back in Australia again, to see if am just calling Sydney home out of habit or if that’s where I really belong. It’s hard to see how it would have happened otherwise. I guess we’ll have to see what tune I’m singing if the Home Office do actually turn around and grant me a work permit after all, whether I’m tempted back.