Viewpoints

I might have given the impression a couple of times that London can be a dangerous place, but, just like anywhere else, it's only as dangerous as you make it. In Cricklewood, the greatest threat to life is getting stuck in a swarm of old women as they try and get on a bus. Bulked up with several winter coats, heads guarded by big fluffy hats and armed with walking sticks and pokey bags of shopping, these girls are far worse than any gang of hoodies, chavs or yobs that the Daily Wail or the Torygraph would have you worry about. Seriously, they have no fear - I guess because they know they're close enough to the end anyway, or else because they feel they're beyond right and wrong at this stage - and they will, shove, elbow and hobnail-boot you into submission. Woe betide you if you get in their way as they cram, seemingly five abreast, through the bus door; a sharp glance is the least you can expect for having the presumption to get in their way. A jabbing finger and shrill remonstration is more likely. My bus passes a bingo hall; it makes for entertaining scenes every day.

Yes, I know this is about the fifth mention of buses on this blog, but, hey, a lot of London involves buses. Any visitor the Special One and I have had taken a bus every day of their stay. It's just one of those London things. Which got me thinking: what does London look like to other people, to our visitors, for example?

You know the way, when you go somewhere new, everything seems heightened? The smallest details stick out, like a fast food sign or an accent (every second shop in Kilburn/Cricklewood is a fast food place anyways); number plates always did it for me when I visited England when younger, always gave the place a feeling of otherness. Now, though, I've lived here for a year and a half (and I was familiar with London from many previous visits) so even when I go to a part of London I don't know, it still has that London feel. Another example; on Doney Casanova's first ever trip to London, not long after we'd moved over, the Snowman, who was also visiting, and I met him off the tube - the much-maligned, dirty, expensive, late-running, oft-cancelled Londerground - and said: "Lads, isn't the tube brilliant." And, of course, to him, it was. Brand new, exciting, underground, the kind of thing you'd only see in a film, and completely alien.

Same as when we went to New Orleans for the Snowman's (later ill-fated) stag weekend. Everything - houses, billboards, etc - looked flat, thin, as if it was all surface and no substance, and the rampant neon commercialism adds a further twist to the hollow feeling, as if the place has been built for one purpose alone; Miss Logic (currently studying in America) and the Scholar (studied there for a year) probably know what I mean.

So, sometimes it's good to look at your surroundings in that frame of mind, refresh yourself a little. Maybe it's age, or else living in a big city (in Cork, as in Belfast, you can see the countryside from places in the city centre), but these days when I get back to my home town, I have a new-found appreciation for going for walks and looking at the green hills - something I would never have done growing up there; as a teenager, there was nothing more I wanted to do than to get the hell out.