It was Samuel Johnson who wrote that ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ Still, he penned those words in 1777, long before he ever could have found himself stuck between stations on the Northern Line, returned to his triple-locked bicycle to find somebody had stolen the saddle and brakes, or had to try to get home from the O2 after a concert. When I left London a decade ago, then, I had been quietly confident that the most famous regular at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese had got it wrong. It was not life that I was tired of. It was definitely London.
It had all started so well. A decade before, I’d arrived from Glasgow on the southbound sleeper train to work as a doctor, and had quickly found myself a flat to share in Hackney. The pride I had felt at becoming a Londoner was only mildly tempered by the realisation that my new flatmates had all provided inarguable reasons why their names could not possibly appear on the lease. Our estate agent had reassured me that being the sole person named on the lease was a wonderful thing as it meant I could be ‘in charge’. And so I learned my first London lesson: never trust anybody who drives a Mini with the name of the company they work for emblazoned all over it.
