cydlawenhau: the blog

24 April 2010 6:20 PM

Stand­ing on the plat­form of Subi­aco sta­tion with the cold wind blow­ing in from the tun­nel mouth reminded me off being back at St Paul’s tube sta­tion and hav­ing the strong con­trast of the com­par­a­tively fresh wind blow­ing on my face as trains passed through the tun­nels that zig zag just below the city sur­face. It made me want to go back and spend more time there.

Im not sure what it is the draws me to Lon­don so much. It’s not as if liv­ing there would be much dif­fer­ent to liv­ing in Perth, other than maybe a longer com­mute to work because, although I might be able to afford hol­i­day accom­mo­da­tion in the old city, in cer­tainly wouldn’t be able to rent there. There is an abun­dance of things to do on the week­ends though: there’s always a new museum or a mar­ket to explore. I might bore of it in time but at least for a while the nov­elty of hav­ing new adven­tures avail­able every week­end would sus­tain hav­ing to slog through a week of work to afford what­ever dive we could find to live in.

There is always the option of liv­ing and work­ing in some­where like Oxford or Bath and tak­ing day trips into the city on week­ends. Though it would be a mat­ter of find­ing a place I could feel as com­fort­able as I did in the city because even the day trip from Oxford back to Lon­don felt like com­ing home. I felt instantly com­fort­able there as soon as we cleared Cus­toms and got on the train in the base­ment of the air­port. It felt sur­pass­ingly famil­iar to wan­der around Hyde Park or to climb the big stair case at the British Museum. And shop­ping, despite the weird shop name and unfa­mil­iar cur­rency did not put me out as much as the strange Christ­mas we spent in Hartington.

Stay­ing at St Brain­less was almost as homely, but only because of the fact it was us and Fizz and Bree treat­ing the place like a big ram­bling house rather than a tran­si­tory bed for the night like St Paul’s was. And its not real­is­tic to plan on liv­ing in a Nor­man Castle.

There is one other thing to take into con­sid­er­a­tion: not liv­ing in the Greater Lon­don area would deprive me of that joy­ful expe­ri­ence of stand­ing on a Tube plat­form and feel­ing the wind as a train approached.