I used to love living in the city. Leafing through the Metro on the morning commute; running into celebrities on Shoreditch High Street; knowing you’re never more than six feet from a Pret… For a girl from a town where nothing much happened, moving to London — where something was always happening — was like going to bed in black and white and waking up in technicolour.
But over the years the sheen wore off. Somewhere in my mid 30s I got fed up of arriving at the office with newsprint on my hands. How come everyone else was bumping into Rihanna and the best I could manage was John Cleese? And isn’t the saying, actually, that you’re never more than six feet from a rat? Not long after said rat materialised, splayed out on our doorstep with an expression that suggested he, too, regretted this choice of final resting place, I packed my bags and left. Tired of London, tired of life? No — tired of a city that seemed increasingly off limits to anyone without a name to drop or a credit card to flash. Keen to discover what kind of life might be had elsewhere.
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It will come as no surprise to the 58.7 million UK residents who live outside London that elsewhere turned out to be quite the enchanting spot. Besides the fresh air and the cheap(ish) pints and the room to swing a cat — all that boring, wholesome stuff — I found something else: community. Never much of a joiner, in an effort to make friends I sidled along to the local running club and within weeks had a small group of pals and a wider network of acquaintances who would honk their horns and wave delightedly from behind the steering wheel if they happened to drive past while I was out for a jog. It made a refreshing change from running in the city where, since no one I knew had a car, the honk of a horn only ever preceded the cry of “Tits!”
At the same time, it was disconcerting. I had always framed as a positive the anonymity of a city where one could sit undisturbed over a cup of coffee and watch the world go by. I thought myself content to lie back and let the energy of the capital wash over and around me. Then I swapped ducking and diving along a crowded station platform for ducking into a café and clocking at least three familiar faces. Bafflingly, I realised I liked it.
Listen, there is plenty of community in London. Of course there is. It’s in the hundreds of neighbours coming together in Peckham to stop immigration officers removing a man from his home. It’s in volunteer-run schemes like FoodCycle combating poverty in unfashionable parts of the city. It’s in the air down Deptford High Street on market day. But for whatever reason, living in London unleashed the loner in me in ways I only began to appreciate once Buckingham Palace was a speck in the rearview mirror. Perhaps the city was simply too big, the prospect of sallying forth in search of connection too daunting. I would have struggled to articulate it but by the time I left, London, for me, had become a cold and unfriendly place.
So the last thing I expected to find on a return visit to the capital was kindness from a stranger. Out for dinner with friends, I handed my boyfriend my credit card to get a round in and promptly forgot about it until days later when I was rummaging through my purse and realised it wasn’t there. Somewhat spookily, at almost the exact moment I discovered it was missing, a Facebook message popped up on my phone: Hey, I was just wondering if you’ve lost a bank card? I was just walking near Brockley station and saw a card with your surname on it. I can hold onto it if it’s yours.
Glossing over the astonishing lack of street smarts that meant I could lose a credit card with a contactless spending limit of £100 and not immediately think to cancel it — clearly, I had gone soft — I was moved by the effort of this person entirely unknown to me. To spot a card lying on the ground and not dash to the shop for a bottle of wine or even just shrug and walk on but instead go to the trouble of finding its owner? This struck me as an extraordinarily kind gesture (and proof, perhaps, that there is still virtue in social media). In the years I had spent away from the city, cosseted by small town life, the London of my memory had become a fortress: enormous, unwelcoming. Over the summer I watched as riots rippled across the city and felt relieved to be far away. Yet here was warmth. Here was selflessness. It gave me pause. I had been wrong about London before. Maybe — just maybe — I had got it wrong again.
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