Stranger in London

I remember the first time I visited London; a 15-year-old high school student born and bred in Rotterdam who disliked school but loved fashion and pop music, who had just spent 15 hours on a coach and a ferry together with 150 other teenagers, all excited as much by the thought of seeing a city around 10 times the size of our own and full of excitement as by the prospect of sneakily getting drunk and maybe hooking up with that guy/girl we’d had our eye on for the entire year. And then our first impressions: the backpackers’ hostel, filthy and full of potentially slightly creepy guys; the food, as bad if not worse than in the Netherlands, and even more expensive! The architecture… Well, most of us did not come from the type of social environment where one pays a great deal of attention to architecture. But the moment we first set out into the city, I knew that I loved the place. I wanted to live in a city as metropolitan as London! In comparison, Rotterdam had never seemed as bland and boring. When it turned out I’d failed the school year and would have to repeat it (a peculiarity of the Dutch education system that appears utterly baffling to every Brit I’ve ever attempted to explain it to), I begged my parents to let me take the trip again and, happily, succeeded, turning me immediately into a bit of an ‘expert’ to my new classmates.

The third time I visited the city came years later, while on a visit home from my new life in Australia. An Australian friend of mine had just moved here, so together we spent a few days exploring the city, although after two years in the land of roos the most remarkable thing about London was the free sale of all types of alcohol in the supermarket… And after a few days in the rain and cold and a brief stop on my way to say goodbye to my parents, I returned Down Under and forgot all about London. Of course, someone with a little more foresight would have realised returning on a tourist visa (not that I had any other options) was never going to be a long-term plan, so a year later I found myself in a situation: I’d just been told I’d been granted my final tourist visa, and immediately afterwards I started receiving (missed) calls from the taxman, who presumably didn’t appreciate the money that kept appearing in my bank account despite me supposedly not having a job. But I didn’t want to return to the Netherlands, so where could I go? The US, I concluded. Unfortunately, although I’d found a way to obtain a working visa, the process was slow and expensive so I needed somewhere to ‘hang out’ while I waited for it to be arranged. A friend suggested Birmingham, UK as a good place to both live and work, so off to England I went. Needless to say (and sorry Brummies), but the girl in question and I are no longer friends, and six weeks later I arrived in London for the fourth time, but this time to live.

By this point, it had become clear the US visa was not going to materialise, so a new plan was needed. The preceding 18 months had changed my outlook on life, and the city no longer seemed as magical as it had those first times I visited years earlier. My new impressions centred around grime, impossible crowds, awful weather and a culture where no one had time for anyone else – least of all strangers – and everyone was permanently in a rush. Such a change from hot, humid, laid-back Brisbane, Queensland! At the time, I felt that surely I’d get used to this change of pace soon enough and I’d settle in and be happy, but even while in relationships I never seemed to manage to stop plotting my escape, all the while feeling homesick for a country in which I hadn’t even grown up, where I’d spent only three years and which had unceremoniously kicked me out. Nevertheless, ‘a couple of months’ turned into years, and the longer I stayed, the more difficult it seemed to become to leave the security of a stable job for the unknown of another country.

London is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of place. The sheer size of the city and the high cost of living mean that especially for those of us who weren’t born here – around one in three of us – friends tend to live all over the place and rarely in very easy each. In addition to the fact that people often live far away and are forced to work A LOT it feels like Londoners tend to keep strangers at a distance, and this has made it difficult to make close friends, as maintaining new friendships here often requires a lot of work; years had passed before I first started feeling like I had friends who I wouldn’t have to contact regularly myself if I wanted to stay in contact. To some, this isolation is a major attraction. A friend of mine recently told me he loves the feeling of being able to walk down the street in complete anonymity, knowing how unlikely it is he will encounter anyone he knows. To me, it’s only served to make me realise I’m nowhere near as antisocial as I used to think I was – as it turns out, I actually enjoy the company of people and the knowledge of being able to find someone to go out or meet up with even on the same day, and this is something I really miss here, where generally things need to be planned well in advance to fit around work and other commitments. As far as I’m concerned, even the glut of museums, galleries, shows and other cultural gems don’t make up for this. London might be great, but it’s not for everyone.

Lately, I seem to keep coming across the Samuel Johnson quote ‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’. Maybe this is true for some, but personally, all I’m tired of is life in London. Thinking of all the things that could go wrong if (when?) I finally go ahead and leave for an uncertain future almost scares me enough to make me stay. But I’ve done it before – and with an extra decade of knowledge and experience, surely I can do it as well, if not better, than last time. So I remind myself that just because something is the wise choice, that doesn’t mean it’s the right one. Some people may – and will – tell me I’m being stubborn, immature and stupid, but even if they turn out to be right, these are my mistakes to make and I’m making the choice to make them.