I always knew London was a great city but I was also aware of its limitations, in fact sometimes I’d wonder what on earth a tourist could possibly think if they travelled into town along the gritty A40, or came up through the Blackwall Tunnel. Soot and grime, dusty houses chopped into half by brutal roads bringing more and more people in. Yuk – wouldn’t you say so? Well I’ve come into town as a tourist now and I think that to really get the point of a place you must first step back and come in again from a different angle.

I get London now I’ve returned as a guest, I really do. All those people who went on about it being gorgeous and brilliant were bang-on, because it’s bloody marvellous is this city, no doubt about it. It smells a bit, yes. It is over-crowded and the traffic is bonkers – I must’ve spent half my visit sitting on buses in the heat, missing Singapore’s cool air-con carriages and efficient bus lanes just for, y’know, buses. Admittedly I saw the whole place through rose-tinted specs because a heatwave landed just as we did and lasted right up til we stepped foot in our return cab to the airport, quite literally. So I noted down a few things in my head, and I think I may well be calling up this page and re-reading it some time down the line when I am back in the UK and moaning on about how rubbish everything is.

The river comes first. I saw a lot of it for some reason and I really love it; it’s just so big and wide and yes, a bit brown, but brown in a good way. And of course there’s the skyline – isn’t any city’s skyline gorgeous, I guess, but that doesn’t mean that ours is not. I like the fuzzy seats on our Tube trains (though I hate to think what’s actually in them) and I like the way you can eat on the trains and buses and drink too (there’s your answer). I love the fact that we have a beach right in the middle of  London town (yes we do, South Bank near Waterloo). You’re falling over restaurants and cafes in London and that’s not a novelty, nor is the fact that they stay open quite late in general, but I love them. Just do. Plates of hot food in those restaurants are usually hot themselves, and when your food arrives so does everyone else’s all at the same time – brilliant! Superdrug has all those teeny tiny tubes of stuff. The Shard is gorgeous and very, very tall. Pimms tastes amazing when you are a little bit late and arrive breathless and flushed. At picnics you sit on proper soft grass and if it’s been warm (and I grant you that’s not often) the grass often turns to hay and then you can pretend to be in the proper country.

People are bouncy Tiggers when London is hot and sunny; they go all ‘festival’ and switch to party-mode and sometimes that means they are feral and shouty, which isn’t great, but other times it means you might get a lovely bit of Aswad floating up from the steaming gardens four floors below your Dad’s open window and that makes a nice little touch to a morning, especially when you have a proper mug of proper tea in your hand. Nice. When the sun shines you can sit in people’s back gardens and pretend you are in Sicily and put on half a stone. Then you can cart that half-stone down the pub and order a nicely mixed vodka and often you can wobble home on foot – actually walk back.

You can telephone a shop and they will go and find someone who can help. That person will tell you that you can take the thing that you bought by mistake back, even if you didn’t buy it from that actual branch. Then they’ll thank YOU for calling THEM. Amazing. People often know the way (though most times they only speak English but hey – they know it, and that’s what’s so great!). You can buy chewing gum and then chew it very loudly (you can also spit it out on the pavement and tread it into the dog poo but we won’t look down, not just now). There are several massive green spaces, some of which have actual woodland animals and all that, dotted about right within the city walls. Splendid.

None of this made me reluctant to come back to Singapore (it was the people who live in the city that did that, but that’s for another post) because for every good London point, Singapore has a matching Good Thing. Changi, for one, beats Heathrow hands down but that just makes coming back a whole lot easier so that’s alright. Anyway, none of this is competition fodder. Just a few souvenirs I brought back with me.