Though born and bred in the city, I did not truly realise I was a Londoner until I left for four years. It took swapping the relentless pulse of the city for the measured elegance of Edinburgh’s cobbled crescents to feel it in my bones.
Edinburgh is beautiful. The castle looming like a patient sentinel, the long light of summer evenings over Arthur’s Seat, the way you can walk from one side of the city to the other without feeling as though you have run a marathon. But London never quite lets you go. It is unruly and exhausting, magnetic and inescapable. It seeps into you, and when you are gone, its absence feels like a missing limb.
