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. -Samuel Johnson

As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.  – Goldwin Smith

Being a tourist in your home city is interesting. The few days I spent in London were not even like visiting old friends (a thing I did shamefully little of) and places it was more of a being a tour guide and relaxing and looking at the cool stuff that I never saw enough of when I lived there.

There were train journeys in the heat. The endless chatter of mobile telephones and the strange conversations of strangers (my fave was a late teen describing to her horrified friends how Yorkshire pudding is actually made; ‘yeah, you, like, pour oil in first!’)

So there were the Elgin Marbles (most of the Parthenon) and the Assyrian collection. There was the new Sainsbury collection (how much stuff can one family have ffs). There was the millennium bridge, caramel nuts on the South Bank & the Tate Modern. There was the somewhat provocatively entitled ‘Virgin Mother’ statue… this is a huge bronze cast of a pregnant woman cut away to show internal anatomy on one side. We perched on the doorstep of the Royal Academy for Astronomy and peered up at her watching the onlookers. I heard three men say ‘Urg, it’s gross’…

Closer to home there were canal-side walks and peeks through the fences of schools. Streets and footpaths lined with faded memories. Hardly any familiar faces (somewhat of a relief) and hardly any familiar traffic layouts (town planning gone mad). The most poignant memories were from St. Mary’s (a 12th century church in the old part of Hemel Hempstead) church hall, where I did ballet, walking through Soho as day turned to evening and watching the balloon demonstrators in Hamley’s.