Goodbye London!

Less than 24 hours from take-off now and I'm sitting in an empty room in an empty house waiting for Ric and the van man come back for me. I bloody well hope they come back for me!
We've been packing, sorting stuff out and saying our goodbyes for what seems like weeks now and are both exhausted and eager to get going, if I can walk with my over-stuffed backpack that is.
I would like to be feeling excited but at this stage I feel quite sick with apprehension and uncertainty. Ah well, I imagine those feelings will evaporate soon enough. I'm more than ready to leave Brixton that's for sure. We've done all that we can to prepare ourselves and besides, there's no turning back now.

As I've packed up my things and decided what possessions I actually need for my travels, I've felt compelled to find a home for my thoughts; to expunge, organise and store them in one place. Looking through my old journals, and countless scraps of electronic twitterings, it strikes me how negative sounding they are, joyless, desperate even. What purpose have all these words ever served I wonder? Why did I write at all? All too rough, too raw, too pure, too inarticulate to be of any interest to others. The stuff of journals not blogs. It’s all retrospective anyway isn’t it?

I’ve been thinking about London, England’s erratically beating heart, a magnet for rich and poor and foreigners alike, the hub of business and social networking for so many, and the place I didn’t make the choice to live in but which so many do.

A lot of people have tried to summarise it. I wonder if it is still or ever was the ‘modern Babylon’ Disraeli proclaimed it to be, the ‘fair’ and ‘majestic’ place depicted so romantically by Wordsworth, or ‘a teen-ager and urchin, unchanged since the time of Dickens’, as John Burger once described it. As I make plans to leave, how can I forget that old chestnut ‘when a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford’? Dr. Samuel Johnson might have had a point but I’m afraid the life we might wish to live here now is more than most of us can afford!

I’d say it’s impossible to live here for any length of time and not feel an affinity with its seeming disorder, schizophrenia, impatience, self-righteousness, and no matter what borough, its grime. As I cycle from the south to the west and the north, from chaotic Brixton to grand Belgravia, the trends are obvious; the car styles change, the perils on the road change, people’s faces are of a different colour, the shops are obviously different and the roads broaden and become greener.

I wonder what, if anything, will draw me back in the end. Where would I choose to live? Can Sydney be that different, as good as I’m to believe? Or will I miss this place and want to come back? Will it be enough that my friends and mother are here?

I hope I can write regular posts but without my laptop to hand, who knows!
So, first stop Tokyo, where we're hooking up with Ric's old school pal...