We took a boat to the pub last night. That’s the kind of thing I imagine people do in Cornwall or Scandinavia as opposed to London, which might be why it’s taken me nearly 12 years of living here to do it. I’ve found the city hard to love recently, something that’s been niggling - I don’t want to be someone who falls out of love with London, for all its failings. But there, on that boat, on the filthy, glittering river, I felt the same rush that arrives every time (yes, still) I go over a bridge here. That this place is a kind of grubby wonderland, and that I couldn’t be luckier to have access to it.
One of the reasons I’ve found London difficult of late is because in the summer it becomes the tourists’ town. But on that boat I straddled the line between local and visitor, a person who could attach memory and fact to the buildings we passed on the water while seeing them for the first time. I watched tourists gather to take selfies with Westminster in the background, saw a little of what they did through their eyes and relished their excitement. There was not so much between us, after all.
Other good things this week: