London Calling

The Strand from the Waterloo Bridge. Sunday, 19 Oct 08

Denmark Street, Friday, 24 Oct 08

At the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Windmill Street, Friday, 24 Oct 08

I am properly falling in love with London now, the place where bodies found under trains cause but minor disruptions to the Westminister crowd, where strays provide shelter to homeless people, where museums that hold the most famous paintings of all time are in turn hosted by bright graffiti, where free runners boast among men with stiff black coats, where houses are old and people are new, where rivers are proper divides and bridges real roads, where Europe is a playground park and Asia is indoors, where stony actors bump into laughing stockbrokers on the Tube, where everyone reads The London Paper on the tube and leaves them like seats for the next man in the bowler hat.

It is humbling and small to be a Londoner, to stand as a speck on the Waterloo Bridge knowing that the embers on your cigarette (not that I smoke) cannot burn more brightly than the stream of headlights both overhead and underground. If you stop to breathe, the crowd will walk through you, but on the The London Paper tomorrow, on the page titled "London Love", you know you'll find a two-lined poem asking to meet the sad raven-haired girl who stood still last night, and you will wonder just how many people will answer to this London's call.

And I know you don't care for London, and it does not inspire your dreams. But London is where I am, where (I now know) you will never be.