Once Upon a Time in London

I arrived in London the first time on 16 February 2003. I had just turned 26 years old. A relationship with the man I thought I would marry was ending and I had just met the man I would eventually marry.

I lived in a pink-roomed apartment on Vancouver's West Side and worked as a legal assistant in a downtown law firm. I wore Esprit and Mexx short-skirted suits to work and commuted in pleather heels. The 2000's were the decade of 'Bridget Jones's Diary' and 'Sex and the City'. Being a single woman in your 20's with a well-stocked closet and an inability to cook was a kind of status symbol. Even if it could be lonely.

My life was perfectly fine.

I have written before that long before I dreamed of a life in Paris, London was the city of my dreams. Three of my four grandparents were from England and my childhood was full of English-isms. Sunday roast dinners, a framed White Ensign flag in my grandfather's basement, plastic carrier bags from Harrods in the boot of my nana's car, and bookshelves stuffed with James Herriot's books and autobiographies of Winston Churchill. Photos of the Queen featured in their houses. My grandfather ate kippers for breakfast and drank dark, sweet tea with every meal. My nana returned from her yearly trips to London with a suitcase full of Marks & Spencer's jumpers and Jaeger silk scarves.

In my teens, I discovered English writers. Predictably, I loved Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. For a period, I pretended to love Shakespeare. I moved on to writers like Marian Keyes, Freya North, Helen Fielding, JoJo Moyes, and the incomparable Jilly Cooper. I imagined myself living all sorts of lives from a sheep keeper in the countryside to a London West End glamazon. In my imagined lives, I rode with the village hunt, worked in financial markets, survived on a diet of crisps, drank Scotch before supper, and went for walks in places with impossible-to-believe names like Hampstead Heath and Primrose Hill.

My favourite films were 'Notting Hill', 'Four Weddings and a Funeral', and 1944's 'National Velvet'.

I hadn't travelled much. Like nearly every West Coast Canadian, my family drove with no air conditioning to Disneyland one hot summer week in the 1980's and I had a memorable nineteenth birthday in Mexico drinking cheap Corona and eating lobsters. There were weekend trips over the Washington State border to buy then-cheap gas and groceries. My grade 10 class went on an exchange trip to the Montreal suburb of Lasalle where they spoke fluent Italian and very little French. But I hadn't crossed the Atlantic.

My biggest fear when my ex and I ended our relationship in 2002 wasn't that I wouldn't get married, but rather that I wouldn't get to travel. And not just travel, travel alone.

I can't explain this fear or why I was so sure I wanted to head off on my own. I had no frame of reference. This was way before travel bloggers and books like 'Eat, Pray, Love' shared the highs and lows of solo travel. But I couldn't get the idea out of my head during that long, post-break-up year. I negotiated a leave of my absence from my job, and I bought a two-month roundtrip ticket from Vancouver to London.

In my last post, I wrote that I found my journal from that trip. I typed it, unedited, when I got to Vancouver. It has moved with me around various flats and eventually to my home in Cambridge. I always thought that one day I would share this journal, whether people wanted to read it or not. I appreciate this may come across as both self-indulgent and overly sentimental.

It is difficult to describe what it has felt like rereading my journal this past month. Sometimes I am embarrassed for my 26-year self and sometimes I think she was a terrible snob. There was a lot of fear and doubt in what I wrote. I was very young. My first impressions of cities like London, Paris, and Barcelona have remained mostly unchanged.

16 February 2003

I arrived safe and sound on a beautiful sunny winter's day in London. My relatives - as far as I understand some posh, distant cousins, picked me up at Heathrow and drove me to the Luna Simone Hotel near Paddington Station. Very tired and more soon.

18 February 2003

London. Crazy, surreal with all its expected stereotypes and quite a few surprises clashing together, taking my breath away and leaving me exhausted. The city is so familiar, but so foreign. Every single step I take feels farther away from Vancouver and triumphant. I think I was almost right a year ago that the feeling of the plane rising beneath me in Vancouver would feel like some tremendous weight had been lifted off my chest. After a difficult year of making unsure decisions based on what I thought I should want rather than what I want, it is huge relief in every sense to be in London. To have the opportunity to live out my dream.

I went for a walk in Hyde Park on Sunday after I arrived. There were horses, ponies, and dogs galloping along Rotten Row. There were people wearing green, rubbery Wellingtons, kids playing soccer (football!), incredible, endless green space, manmade lakes, all nestled in the chi-chi Kensington neighbourhood next to Harrods. I then went back to my cousin's flat for a proper English tea - proper to me. They didn't use tea bags, but instead a complicated arrangement with silver strainers, tiny spoons, and rich fragrant tea leaves.

My hotel, the Luna Simone, is better than I expected. Tiny with a single bed and a window that lets in a sliver of light. I can't turn around without crashing into something with my $500 designed-for-women Jack Wolfskin backpack.

London, overall, seems small. Its intense population, the sheer amount of people coming at you from all directions, make it feel even smaller. The streets pulse. Everyone is rushing and most of them seem to be wearing sneakers (trainers!) that are so vivid in their colour and style that my carefully purchased black Diesel sneakers seem bland and outdated. Women wear everything from sneakers to high heels to boots of all lengths. I can't stop looking at people's feet. It's dangerous, because I feel if I put my head down for a single moment I get mowed down by a crowd of Londoners.

My ex-roommate from university is living in London and I moved from the Luna Simone Hotel to his comfortable couch in a neighbourhood called Clapham. It's on the Northern Line. When we are touring London together, I must fight every urge not to clutch at him for reassurance.

I hope I never forget my first impressions of London.

I don't want to forget my newfound ease at being able to negotiate the Tube with my massive Jack Wolfskin backpack. Despite my Lonely Planet guide's warnings. I don't want to forget the exact spot - a classic red London phone booth on the Strand - where I made my first long distance call to Chris. I don't want to forget having an impossibly expensive high tea at Fortnum & Mason with nearby loud talking Americans and a pianist gently playing classical music. I don't want to forget seeing the life-sized Stubbs (Whistlejacket) at the National Gallery and then walking along the Thames chasing the sunset.

It hasn't rained once.

19 February 2003

My first thought this morning, unhelpfully, is surely I can't be expected to travel another 6-ish weeks alone, with none of my comforts, and surrounded by strange people and strange places. I guess I must be exhausted after an endless day of walking, touring, and turning down incorrect streets only to find myself on another street that looks the same but isn't. Constantly fighting crowds, locals, tourists, dropping my Lonely Planet guide and smacking into post boxes or some ancient statue that seems to magically appear in front of my face. The whole experience is utterly overwhelming.

To end my rotten day of feeling sorry for myself, my ex-roommate didn't show for our theatre date at the National Theatre where we were meant to see Joseph Fiennes in Love's Labour Lost. I sat in the theatre's Brutalist style lobby trying both not to look suspicious or to cry. I waited anxiously. But I really wanted to bolt to any pub, get massively drunk and make expensive Pound-per-minute long distance calls to my friends but mostly to Chris.

The good news is I don't feel the kind of homesick I felt when I spent a summer in Banff. That was a debilitating and left me constantly tearful and unable to leave my room. But I am feeling out of my element and daunted when I think I am nowhere near the end of my travels. It is hard to think that life is happening in Vancouver and Victoria without me.

On a brighter note, I went shopping yesterday! Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and other Kensington High Street boutiques. Harrods is so over the top. Their staff 'Madam' you to death, even with my purchase of Harrods' brand loose tea from Harrods' World. Yes, there is an actual floor named 'Harrods' World'. Like a retail theme part with every souvenir made in their signature dark green and patterned with fawn-coloured Teddy bears and black Scotty dogs wearing red tartan bow ties. I have never felt so vulgar and unglamorous in my entire life. Like I just crawled out of the bush from some backwoods Canadian town wearing a red-quilted lumberjack shirt and mud-caked hiking boots.

The culture and fashion in London are so extreme. I made a note to myself that I must purchase black pointed-toe flat shoes and a fitted blazer, either with bold stripes or in denim. Both seem to be the height of fashion here, though back in Canada I hadn't seen anyone where a fitted blazer since the late 1980's. Somehow, they look perfect here. I do expect to be called out at any moment for my terrible style. I imagine I will be innocently walking along a street, studying yet another badly drawn map, looking for yet another museum, when I will be attacked by a London fashionista outfitted from the pages of British Vogue. She won't be polite, but rather start yelling at me for my poor dress sense and head-to-toe Lululemon outfit.

It isn't that people aren't nice here. They are truly kind, and I have seen very little of the famous British reserve. It's just that I feel so uncomfortable and behind about everything from books to politics to restaurants to films to drinking. And of course, fashion.

I will fight this period of melancholy.