London calling

I may well have to change the name of this blog to "Who Needs a Net?" in a cheap tactic to shake off the fear conveyed by the original name without having to change the URL.

It's been two months of London life now, having stepped, bleary and ecstatic, off the plane at Gatwick Airport on 2 June. Mexico I said a mostly-dry-eyed goodbye to two weeks earlier, tearing a path across Canada in a vain attempt to see everyone and do everything in ten days following.

Two months. Wow.

I look back on Mexico now in much the same way that I reflect back on love affairs long run their course - with great warmth and fondness, yet with a sense of gentle finality. Mexico has not left me, oh no: I listen to Cafe Tacuba and Mono Blanco on my iPod regularly, and lustily translate the lyrics of Paquita la del Barrio to anyone who shows the faintest curiousity, and I have on more than one occasion been nearly consumed by a craving for a tamal or pozole. I look at pictures of tiny turtles and mountain paths and grinning friends with roaring gratitude that that country, those people, took me in and allowed me to share their culture, their history, their reality with me. Ah! It makes me catch my breath just to think of it all. What did I ever do to deserve such an experience?

London was a tougher sell. In the weeks after receiving the job offer in London, I frequently heard some variation on the same refrain: "London! You must be so excited!"

I wasn't.

Not really.

It wasn't anything against London per se - one of the great cities of the world, yadda yadda yadda - as much as it was that London felt just too damn much like home after three years in the sublime surrealism of Mexico. London would be my language, my history, and, as a colonist, something very similar to my culture. I'd grown up with Fawlty Towers and Yes Minister, I'd lived in Edinburgh and Leeds, I'd been called Erik-er by my English grandmother my entire life - how was London going to surprise me?

London has surprised me.

London has enthralled me.

If Mexico is the nostalgic reminiscences of a past love, London is the dashing new love on my doorstep with a bouquet of sunflowers and a poem he composes off the top of his head.

London is random blue plaques on historical points of interest that most other countries would write operas about, but which London, in its oversaturation, can only be bothered to notate half-heartedly.

London is eating lunch beside Tower Bridge, mightly dismantling the glass skyscrapers on the north side of the river in my mind to reveal the city that Elizabeth I would have known.

London is attempting to look suave and undeterred by the heat and the crowds on the Tube in the morning, cheerily fanning myself with my tube pass and counting how many stops to go.

London is getting off a Canada Day cruise up the Thames and **sha-BAM!** there is Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. (Well, ok, fine, the third construction of it, but STILL...)

London has won me over. I am madly, passionately in love with this city. Head over heels in love with this city. Filled up by this city in a way that no city has filled me up before.

I am happy.

I am so incredibly, indescribably, undeniably lucky, and so very very full of love and gratitude right now.