Spend a few days in a foreign city and you may start to believe you’ve developed a sense of the place — perhaps you could even picture yourself living there. But stay a little while longer and you quickly come to realise you scarcely understand it at all.
I visited Sydney for three weeks over Christmas (I marinated in factor 50 and returned paler than when I arrived). The first week in Australia was — crippling jet lag and the intergenerational trauma that is Christmas gift-giving aside — a world of prelapsarian delights. A time machine back to, if not quite the womb, then perhaps the mid-Noughties, only with Uber.
