If, like me, you grew up with British culture from afar, through English novels, TV shows, films and a famous London-themed real estate board game, then coming to London for the first time will be full of odd little moments of recognition. You will find yourself walking down Oxford Street, only to notice Regent Street and Bond Street in quick succession. Then you will look up at a clock and realise that you are looking at Big Ben; or you realise that the bells you are hearing come from St. Martin’s, and though they are not singing, “You owe me three farthings”, they might as well be.

My trip into the city this morning was filled with moments like these. I set off with the intention of seeing Westminster Abbey and the House of Parliament, but while there I became aware of so many other places in the near vicinity of where I was: Trafalgar Square and the Nelson Column; No. 10 Downing Street (not accessible from the street, it turns out, at least not to the general public); not to mention all the familiar names of places and streets that jumped out at me as I walked. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a foreign city that is filled with so many ready-made memories and associations.

Yet those things which feel so familiar can catch us by surprise with just how different they are. Take, for instance, the convention here of standing to the right on an escalator; back home, it would be to the left. Everything looks and feels the same, but for one minor detail.

Then there are those moments which curiously blend the very familiar with the entirely different. The communion service at Westminster Abbey was a perfect example of this: a liturgy I know well, set in a medieval building so full of history which I have absorbed all my life yet never seen or connected with personally. Was I really standing in the building where William the Conqueror was crowned? Was that a real Medieval painting on the back wall of the chapel? Like the street names on a Monopoly board, I had taken in such things from birth, yet no more expected to come near them than I had expected to see a giant boot paying rent on a hotel at Trafalgar Square. And yet – the building where I took communion had born witness to people and times that for me was only the stuff of history books; and when I shared the greeting of the peace, I shook hands with people who, it seemed, came here for communion most days on the way to work.

Living in a relatively new city like Melbourne, it is easy to feel detached from the kind of deep history that London carries on its surface. I did not go to all of the Roman ruins that are here to be seen; there were locations from the books of my childhood that I did not have time to visit. I have spent much of my time here – only two days – trying to balance constant movement with just being: enjoying what is here; taking it in, not consuming more than I can process. But one memory will, I think, remain clearly: that moment during communion when I looked beneath me and stared at the tiles lining the chapel’s floor and realised that those tiles were profoundly, magnificently old, and I could wonder, for that moment, how many others, kings and commoners alike, had stood on that floor. I felt, for that moment, not like a tourist trying to squeeze in every significant London moment; I was a Christian, standing on the same floor as a millennium of other Christians. And that was a beautiful moment.

I did not get to see Buckingham Palace; I forgot to visit the Coliseum I saw listed on a map. There were Monopoly Streets I did not get to walk. I have had so little time and so many demands on it. In a London-themed Bingo contest, I doubt I would come close to winning. But I took communion at Westminster Abbey, and that was worth not having a sleep-in.

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.