Getting back together with London
I registered with a GP the other day and was so pleased with myself. Nearly 3 months after I’d moved back to London, it was a milestone. I'm putting down roots, I'm on the books, I will be cared for in some form, I'm home. It’s such a small thing but it took me several years of living in Ireland before I registered with a doctor. I moved there in early 2017 and up until 2019 I was still on the books at a practice in Stoke Newington, a place I hadn’t lived since 2011 (all these dates, all this movement!) My hand was forced one night, though, when I had an excruciating UTI and had to phone the local out of hours medical service from my house in Belfast. I was triaged by a receptionist then spoke to a doctor who asked for my HSC number; full of shame, I explained that I didn’t have one and he advised me to make my way to their centre out in suburban South Belfast to pick up some emergency antibiotics, then emphasised that I must register with a local practice as soon as possible for proper medical attention, all this said with a kind of irritated sigh in his voice.
It was about 3 in the morning and I ordered a cab to get down there. I was a bit nervy, I wasn’t entirely sure where we were going and as we drove through the empty streets it felt at that moment as if the taxi driver and I were the only two people awake in the world. He made conversation with me in a way that seemed vaguely creepy and I felt so alone, so disembodied and disconnected from this place that was supposedly now my home – not even registered with a GP, what is wrong with me! I texted some friends to let them know what I was doing; I knew they were all asleep but I wanted people to know what was happening, even if they wouldn’t see the messages for some hours.
Living alone in a new city – or even in an old, familiar city – can be a bit like this. You need to plant down some external signs of your existence to remind yourself and others that you’re there. (The lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 intensified this feeling by about a million times of course) I still don’t know what it was that lead me to this fundamental denial of my relationship with the local services of Belfast for so long, but I do remember the sense of deep relief when I was finally a registered patient of Ormeau Park Surgery. It was similar to when I joined the local library. Here I am, in this place, in this neighbourhood - I exist! So prosaic yet somehow so profound.
The question of how to make a city your home is one I've thought about a lot over the last few years. In June of this year, I moved back to London, the city I was born in and where I have spent most of my life, having lived in Ireland for 6 years, and I do feel as if I need to get to know the place again. I need to form a new kind of relationship with it as who I am now, that is, a single, 43-year-old, writer/ researcher/ civil servant living on her own, as opposed to who I was when I left, a 37-year-old adult education teacher/ writer in a cohabiting romantic relationship with a man.
I loved Belfast. I really, really, really loved Belfast. I made some of the deepest friendships of my life there, met some of the best people, had some of the best nights out, some of the most gratifying academic, intellectual and political experiences, the best chats, the best walks, the most stimulating conversations and relationships and the most fun. I had my fortieth birthday there, my little end of terrace house filled to the rafters with people I loved from all over the place, including all the friends I’d made there. I really did feel part of something and it has to be said that Covid fucked it up a bit, though there were certain friendships that were immeasurably deepened by the bonding experience of surviving a pandemic together. I finished my PhD during lockdown and never really got the chance to properly celebrate. I did my viva on Zoom during the bleak winter lockdown of February 2021, alone in the cold, ramshackle house off the Ormeau Road I’d just moved into, where the night before I had been kept awake by rain dripping through my bedroom ceiling. When I was told that I’d passed, I closed my laptop and looked around the room, wondering what to do with myself. (My heroic friend Alison came over with a bottle of champagne as a gift and we went for a walk in the dark rainy Belfast streets.)
Afterwards I had no time to collect myself, celebrate myself, rest myself. I had various short term jobs, tried to write, couldn’t write, tried to network and create opportunities to continue my research and spent most of the period between 2020 and 2022 beating myself up in the most unhelpful, self-punishing fashion. I worked on a few great bits of research and community engagement, but it was hard to make any of it stick. In my head I was not doing enough to make the place work for me, I wasn’t trying hard enough. But really, what a time! I was utterly exhausted from the effort of keeping myself alive, alone, away from many of my friends and family, in incredibly stressful and uncertain circumstances, for nearly two years.
Is it a cliché to say that moving back to London feels a bit like getting back together with someone? Because that is how it feels, with all the doubts and prevarications – and almost sense of defeat - that such a decision might involve. People – my friends, my family, my therapist – repeatedly remind me of the reasons behind my decision. It wasn’t working in Belfast, I wasn’t earning enough, I was often lonely. I missed London and wanted to be nearer my family. I had a great three week stretch of housesitting in Walthamstow and Highbury in summer 2022, when things just started to fall into place, I began to feel like London was mine again and I realised I wanted to ‘come home’. But what is home? None of this is straightforward and I have very mixed feelings about coming back here.
If you’ve never lived anywhere else and have the chance to, it can be an excellent thing to spend some time living outside of London. There are many reasons for this; among them is that it gives you perspective on how utterly insufferable Londoners – myself included – can be. I was in a pub in Highbury a few months ago with my friend Kate during a stint of housesitting round there and it made me think about all this. It was a Friday night and the pub was busy, full of young, attractive, well dressed, successful-looking people. I had a great evening with my mate, but there was something that had mildly annoyed me about the pub and I realised the next day what it was: everyone seemed so fucking pleased with themselves.
Before you rush to say something along the lines of ‘how do you know they were feeling/ what do you expect in Highbury, people don’t behave like that everywhere in London/ don’t be so judgemental’ I should say that I know that feeling. I remember very clearly this sense of self-satisfaction, thinking myself such a total and resolute Londoner, wandering the streets of Soho and Camden and Stoke Newington and Archway, walking down Holloway Road, sitting on the top of a bus, crossing Waterloo Bridge, going for a walk in the City at the weekend and stumbling across some totally amazing bit of centuries-old London history, asking how people could ever live anywhere else, what city has what London has, the bounty and mess and radical history and transport and beauty and so on. And yes, London is extraordinary. I love it with all my heart. Perhaps this is an argument I am just having with myself.
But London is not everything. I mean, obviously it’s not – though I do often feel the need to remind people of this when they’re making a big, universalising statement about some aspect of culture or public transport or food or museums or something else and what it is and isn’t like, and I have to clarify ‘you mean, in London?’ and they sheepishly qualify, ‘oh, yes, I meant in London’. It can swallow you up without you even realising it.
When I started to tell people in Belfast I was moving back I sometimes, stupidly, felt a bit embarrassed. With certain friends I developed a kind of ironically rueful bit, I was the Brit returning to the colonial centre. Belfast was definitely home, but I never entirely shook off that self-consciousness of my Englishness there (and yes, though I had spent my whole life pointedly describing myself as from London and not England, in Ireland I was forced to accept that I am indeed English – Irish family or not, Londoner or not) I never stopped feeling tentative when voicing opinions about the political situation there, despite being engaged in it to varying degrees, including through my PhD. ‘Of course, I'm an outsider…’ I would begin. Some friends tried to encourage me to stop doing this – ‘you’ve lived here for 6 years, you’re involved with the place, you’ve as much right to talk about it as anyone else‘. But it was hard. At my leaving drinks in the Sunflower, we wanted to ask the lads sitting next to us to move up a bit to make space for more friends that were arriving. ‘I can’t do it with this accent!’ I exclaimed and an Irish friend did it instead. I read that anecdote back now and think to myself, ‘how utterly stupid!’ But at the time the feeling was real.
I lived in the north of Ireland for 6 years, Belfast for nearly 5. I loved it there and I am pleased to be home. I try to watch myself in all this, try not to conflate the extremely complicated reality of London with “London”, the place satirised by people who paint us all as privileged, self-satisfied hipsters in a north London pub. That, of course, is not London, at least not all of it. Just as Belfast is not an 11th night bonfire or mural tour of the Falls or a night out in The Crown (at least not all of it)
I first realised I loved Belfast in the back of a taxi on my way back from the American bar in Sailortown, where I had a little moment of silent communion with the city as I looked out at the Lagan – nothing special, just a quiet Friday night, feeling like the place was mine. And I had a similar experience in London the other night on a busy 205 bus on my way back from the pub, watching people, listening to people. I just felt at home. I live in London again. That’s it. It’s just a city, like any other city. And you have to live somewhere.