Love Letter to London

Dear London,

Thank you for a very wonderful weekend. These few days together truly cemented our long standing love affair.

As you know, we go way back. You took me into your arms as a young girl of 10, intoxicating me with your bright lights and promise of excitement from theatre: (Blood Brothers in the West End was a favourite) to shoe shopping and Madame Tussauds; I was addicted at first sight.

You embraced me again as a 19 year old student at Goldsmiths’, University of London, educating and enveloping me with all your hustle and bustle. You never let me down, offering me fabulous career opportunities, life long friends, a husband and finally my own little star: a baby. If it wasn’t for you London, I’d not have had those things. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

With every love affair, comes adversity though. It’s true, I started to get tired of you once baby O hit the scene. London and kids didn’t seem to work so well. Navigating around, not finding a seat on the tube, fighting to get prams up and down steps at train stations, struggling through shops with the only alternative of hour long traffic jams just to get down the road- does not equal happiness. For singles and couples there is nowhere quite like London, but for me when baby came along, I knew a move away would be better for all, and more so, a move near my family for support. Priceless.

I do love living away from you London yet I find myself secretly lusting after you and sometimes catch myself imagining I’m only away for a little while, only soon to return to your warm if not smoky arms once more and who knows maybe that time will come again. Of course I will still work in London when jobs come up but adjusting to being away from you for long periods is hard. I miss you.

Time apart from you has been good for us though. It’s made me appreciate you again. Like a long lost lover, I’ve rediscovered you now with new eyes. I no longer feel like your long suffering wife.

Staying at hotel by the Southbank was so fun, I was on holiday in the city I called home for so long. Walking for hours across Central London, visiting the National and the Portrait Gallery opened my eyes to Canaletto and his contemporaries and portraits of our modern leaders and stars. Inspired is not the word. Re-energised and revitalised is more deserved. Meals and shopping and friends and hilarity in those short days was so enjoyable and all with baby in tow too.

London, I love you again.

See you soon. You can count on it,

Honest Mum

x

This post inspired two beautiful posts from Manana Mama and Polish Mama on the Prairie.

Please write your own and I will link here.

Photograph (c) Vicki Psarias-Broadbent.