Cities Change, But Some Things Stay the Same

It’s noon when we hit London, and Gatwick, an absolute armpit of an airport that’s currently being disimproved by overdue improvements.

Once we’re past the usual long, ugly, angry queues at immigration, I notice, bleakly, how very unaesthetic my countryfolk are as a nation compared to, say, the Swedes or the Thais – Americans, insert your own “teeth” joke here — although, at least, since it’s sunny, folk seem less collectively miserable than usual.

This, of course, is the point at which the conventional narrative of longterm travel dictates that we experience “reverse culture shock”, with a particular focus on the price of the basic necessities of life and perhaps some horror at consumerism.

We don’t. I know London’s expensive. I’m braced for that. And Zac, who’s a sunny little soul even when laid up in a rural Mongolian clinic with an untreated broken arm, shrugs off a long flight like nothing, and anyway, he isn’t paying.

In the run-up to our last visit, I felt conflicted, stranded, like a homeless person coming back to what was once home, torn between the sense of return and the desire to escape, desperate to enjoy and yet oddly out of place. This time – well, this time, I’m pretty sure we know where we’ll settle once Zac’s had enough of being a nomad, and so, we’re quite close to bogstandard expats on a jolly, back in the old country to catch up with friends and family.

Except whenever anyone asks where we’re living, I say, “Well, we’re here at the moment…”

I extract my Hong Kong SIM and rifle through the little camera bag pocket where I keep my SIM cards. Australia? Nope. Timor Leste? Nope. Nepal? Nope. Indonesia? Nope. God, I don’t even know which country some of these are from….

Our first stop at Gatwick is WHSmith, where I load up on English language print media at – oh joy! — non-import prices.

The bits of it that aren’t obsessed with celebrities seem to be majoring on the catalogue of death and destruction that will undoubtedly result from daytime temperatures possibly soaring to the dizzy heights of 30°C (86°F). This is a theme that I find pleasingly familiar, in line with our quasi-annual parade of snowstorm horrors, when schools shut and trains stop for the type of weather that Canadians count as a mild autumn day.

Also, junk food, yay! Salt & vinegar crisps! And Pickled Onion Monster Munch, an infantile taste which I have yet to grow out of, especially since my spawn adores them too.

I extract my Hong Kong SIM and rifle through the camera bag pocket where I keep my SIM cards. Australia? Nope. Timor Leste? Nope. Nepal? Nope. Indonesia? Nope. Mongolia? Nah. God, I don’t even know which country some of these are from….

SIM swapped in, I text my ma and Caro to confirm we’ve made it safely, and double-check Caro’s address (she has, most inconsiderately, moved since we were last here).

Then there’s currency to address. I go through my purse (bought in Lijiang, China), shift the stray Hong Kong dollars, Mongolian togrog and Dubai dirham into the cards section, and put my British pounds into the body of the purse.

In the very special clusterfuck that is British rail transportation in the free market era, there’s about 17 different cheap trains leaving, all of them on different operators with different route restrictions.

All organised, I head off in search of the trains, which, thanks to the bastard reorganisation of Gatwick, aren’t where I remember them being.

It’s most discombobulating.

And, further, in the very special clusterfuck that is British rail transportation in the free market era, there’s about 17 different cheap trains leaving, all of them on different operators with different route restrictions, which means – for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of travelling in Blighty — that if you buy the wrong ticket you’ll be charged a penalty fare for having the temerity to take the wrong company’s train.

I join the queue to find a man who can advise me which is the cheapest ticket to buy to get us into London Bridge – it could be a return, two singles, or some insane combination of the two.

By now starting to feel the time-change (it’s nine in the evening Hong Kong time, and, despite sterling work with the gin and tonics and vin rouge, I haven’t slept as much as I’d like in transit, thanks to that bastard latte in Dubai), we head back into London Town.

I don’t know how foreigners do it, honestly, I don’t. Well, actually, I do. They front up stupid dinero for the Gatwick Express because they can’t work out why any sane country would have one expensive airport train taking 30 minutes and 17 cheap trains taking — well, frankly, not much longer — to get into the same bloody city, and it all becomes just too confusing for words.

There used to be a grimy old bus garage out the back, where a super-long, single-decker “bendy bus”, the 149, transported me to the myriad delights of Shoreditch (in the 90s), Dalston (in the noughties) and now, for age comes to us all, Stokey.

I defy anyone not to get a buzz of excitement when crossing the Thames on a sunny, summer day, looking down the river at Tower Bridge and the London Eye, police boats and freighters all lined up, the Thames’ murky waters glistening in the sunlight, the waterfront that architectural hodgepodge that speaks of a millennium of heritage.

It’s one of those things – like taking a taxi through Beijing late at night, whooshing on an expressway past the Forbidden City all lit up, or looking up at the Eiffel Tower from the Seine – that’s just iconic.

I’m pleased to be back in London. I’m looking forward to revisiting old favourite places, and getting out to some of the spots I never got around to before, and doing some of our favourite things to do again.

But London Bridge itself is oddly, bastardly different. Gah.

In the finest tradition of British customer service, the lady seems more than a little irritated to be bothered with such trivia as directions when she has a job to do, while oblivious to the fact that said job consists, in its entirety, of giving information to tourists.

There used to be a grimy old bus garage out the back, where a super-long, single-decker “bendy bus”, the 149, transported me to the myriad delights of Shoreditch (in the 90s), Dalston (in the noughties) and now, for age comes to us all, Stokey.

Now there isn’t.

It’s all shiny! And new! It looks like a bloody shopping centre, in Milton Keynes, or possibly Slough, except no one’s put the shops in. And there’s a bloody great glass thing on the plaza, and nary a bus to be seen.

“What IS that glass thing?” I ask my spawn, accusingly. (I have, I notice, gone “full expat”, which is to say I resent my city for having the temerity to change in my absence, and thereby completely bugger up my mental map of it. Watch me. I’ll be whining about immigrants, next.)

“THAT, Mum,” he says, dripping sarcasm from every single word. “Is The Shard.”

“Oh,” I say, and head towards the information desk. In the finest tradition of British customer service, the lady seems more than a little irritated to be bothered with such trivia as directions when she has a job to do, while oblivious to the fact that said job consists, in its entirety, of giving information to tourists, into which stratum of society we, thanks to the backpacks, inevitably fall.

I can charge my Oyster card in a shop back that way. Our bus leaves from the bridge, apparently. And, further, it’s a double-decker, a peculiarly pointless recreation of a Routemaster on which, I dimly recall from tutting over it online, our mayor has spent something like a million quid apiece, largely because he liked them.

I manage to miss our stop completely, and end up in the Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Stamford Hill, a navigational error I’m alerted to by the bewigged, bestockinged lady and sidelocked, frockcoated gentleman who are waiting at the bus stop, minding a three-wheeler Bugaboo.

Embarrassingly, given I’ve ridden this bus many hundreds of times, I manage to miss our stop completely, and end up in the Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Stamford Hill, a navigational error I’m alerted to by the bewigged, bestockinged lady and sidelocked, frockcoated gentleman who are waiting at the bus stop, minding a three-wheeler Bugaboo.

Back we go, to the bus stop on the other side of the road.

“Can’t we just get a taxi, Mum?” asks Zac, whose pack is weighing him down.

I can’t blame him. I always feel like a twat carrying a backpack in London, too.

“No,” I say. “We’re in London. Taxis are REALLY expensive.”

“What, like a fiver?” he says.

“God, no,” I say. “More. The minimum fare was over a fiver last time I was there. And anyway, there aren’t any up here.”

I ring Caro, and try and explain that I’ve failed to find Stoke Newington Church Street, a street with which I am, in theory, more than familiar, wishing, not for the first time, that I could trust myself with 24/7 internet access enough to run a smartphone with a map on it, or that I’d just got a SIM for Zac’s iPhone at the airport.

Caro will come and rescue us, she says, and we hop on a bus back in the opposite direction. And – yay! – there she is! Within seconds we’re sitting outside her flat in that rare and blissful thing, a sunny London summer, and yakking away.

They don’t talk about travel. They don’t talk about school. Within a few minutes they’re out in the streets playing – sorry, boys – one of the most execrable games of “baseball” I’ve seen outside a YouTube fail video, then breaking the X-Box out for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, with zombies.

There are, I find, some noticeable differences in the way that adults and children, especially boy children, pick up after they haven’t seen each other for a while. We’ve saved the unveiling of Zac’s impressive scar for Fred and Caro, but beside that there’s little talk of travel.

Caro and I catch up on what’s happened in our lives, and friends’ lives, to date, since we last saw each other a year and a half ago – in the way of people of our advancing ages, there’s not the flurry of news there might have been a decade before, when either lives changed more, or changes seemed more dramatic, or perhaps some combination of the two.

I don’t inflict travel tales on her. I figure, that if friends or family are particularly interested in our travels, they can ask about them, read about them, or both.

Zac, meanwhile, hooks up with Fred, who he calls his “brother from another mother”, and who he’s hung out with in Brisbane, Cairns and London since he left the UK for good, and Aslan, the third of the dynamic duo.

They don’t talk about travel. They don’t talk about school. Within a few minutes they’re out in the streets playing – sorry, boys – one of the most execrable games of “baseball” I’ve seen outside a YouTube fail video, then breaking the X-Box out for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, with zombies.

We crash around 10pm UK time, or 6am Hong Kong, and wake at 7.30am UK, fully rested and without, as far as I can see, a hint of jetlag.

Around 2am Hong Kong time we decamp for pizza, with Aslan’s ma, Hatice. Prosecco is caned. Pasta is consumed. Fun is had. And – I’m already starting to think of Italy, where we’re headed in the aim of fulfilling Zac’s number one travel dream, to eat Italian food in Italy.

We crash around 10pm UK time, or 6am Hong Kong, and wake at 7.30am UK, fully rested and without, as far as I can see, a hint of jetlag. (The art of conquering jetlag, for what it’s worth, is to stay up till a sensible time at night and get up at a sensible time in the morning, and avoid naps – I find it a lot easier to cope with than, say, waking up at 5.30am five days a week.)

I wouldn’t say it feels as if we’d never been away, but, as I catch yet another familiar bus towards Kings Cross for that familiar train to my parents’ house in Norfolk, I feel at least as at home as I have in Harbin, Ubud or Dahab, and we are, both of us, very much looking forward to an enormous and long pre-arranged family gathering.

It’s in the Peak District, of all places, a famously scenic part of England which, in the way of a local, rather than a tourist, I’ve actually never visited. We’re looking forward muchly.

Astute readers will observe that I’m months behind on my life. This is because I didn’t want to segue from disaster to disaster and miss the good bits in between, which is what I’ve historically done. Also, the pic at the top of this post is by Caro, not me.