I have always wanted to come to England.
When I was a child, for reasons that have escaped me in the years since, I was quite an Anglophile and dearly wished that I had been born in England or, if possible, Scotland. It wasn’t possible; neither option was. I had been born in Australia, and that’s all there was to it.
Sometime towards the end of high school – owing to a mixture of having been to Europe on a cultural exchange (to Switzerland; it went badly) and studying Australian history, I started to appreciate my home country for what it was. The Europhile in me started to be tempered by the realisation that people who had approached Australia in the past with a wish to make it more European had not, generally speaking, been motivated to great love and good deeds as a result. It seemed better to love Australia on its own terms. And so I began to do so.
Still, there has always been a sense in me that somehow in coming to the UK I would be getting in touch with my origins in a way that couldn’t happen anywhere else. Much as I love Australia and much as I have grown to love other places closer to Australia – Malaysia, for one – I have retained an unresolved wish to go to the UK. And this year the announcement of two good friends that they would be moving to England gave me the push I needed. I had friends in Holland too; perhaps I could make a trip to visit them both. And so here I am, after a few months of planning and anticipating; here I am, with the sound of London rain outside my hotel room, my clothes drying from an outing in that rain and my stomach rumbling to tell me that, soon, on my way to Soho and the British Museum, I should get some lunch. But instead I am sitting on my bed inside a small but cosy – and delightfully warm – hotel room opposite Hyde Park, tapping out my thoughts so far on the iPad resting on my lap.
And what are those thoughts? First of all, it is all so amazingly familiar. It is a mix of two things that makes it so; first of all, the Kensington/Bayswater area where I am staying looks quite a lot like places back home – the area of Sydney, for instance, with a park also called Hyde Park; the older streets of Sydney’s Paddington. Despite the fact that it bears the same name as my home suburb of Kensington (and I am amused by the realisation that I am quite close to South Kensington Station, the name of the station where I catch the train to work most days), there is no real likeness to my home. But the name makes it feel comfortingly familiar. Then there’s the fact that I cut my literary teeth on the works of Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse and so there are many familiar sights – the sorts of streets that Poirot or Bertie Wooster would have walked; apartments like the ones they would have visited. And I am happily reminded of a scene in the first season of Fry and Laurie’s “Jeeves and Wooster” in which Barmy Fotheringay-Fipps says, “I don’t think I’ve ever been to Kensington”, to which Bertie replies, “Yes you have, Barmy. Your mother lives there.” And then a somewhat befuddled Barmy responds, “Oh, that Kensington.”
I, having moving from Kensington to Kensington, can understand a smidgeon of his confusion, and it pleases me to do so.
There is much left to see and little time to see it: I have not been down to the Thames; I have not seen Buckingham Palace or the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. Will I have time for it all? Will the weather permit as much as I want to do? I normally enjoy just wandering through a city and soaking up its atmosphere; today I soaked up two parts water to each part atmosphere. But my stomach has not stopped pestering me and so I will need to face the rainy streets again even if only to eat. But I suspect I will be unable to stop myself from doing more than that. I am in London, after all, and after close to 28 years of wanting to be here, I think I will want to make the most of it.
The Consolations of Writing 