London, 2024
Coincidentally, my trip to London this year was bookended by The Lord of the Rings. I started rewatching the trilogy just before I left and finished The Return of the King when I got home (having just obtained the 2020 remastered blu-rays, which was the reason for my rewatch, I wholeheartedly recommend them for fans of these movies). I say coincidentally, but sometimes I feel like a coincidence is really just the universe telling me something, if I listen.
I go to London so often, and know it so closely, that it isn’t a touristy trip for me when I visit, it is a visit. It is going to see old friends, and going to see one old friend in particular that will be there long after all the others move away: the city itself. The streets and the sounds, the shape of the skyline on the South Bank, Eros in the rain.
Going to London always feels like a return. It probably always will. I will never feel like I’m going somewhere new. But it’s not the kind of return where you go home and find that everything was just the way you left it, because the city teems relentlessly with life and it changes, it changes, and so do I. I am not the person who once lived there, and it is not the city that I left.
One of my favourite things about the Lord of the Rings is the space it accords to the journey home, when you come back and realise you can’t settle back in just the way you used to live. You sit in the Green Dragon Inn with your favourite ale, or in Monmouth Coffee with your favourite flat white, and you know it can never be the same even if you’re at your old table, your old spot. And yet, here you are. Here the inn is, here the coffee shop is. Here you both are, keeping each other company again, and that’s something. It means more, now, than it used to. Post-pandemic, I remind myself not to take for granted ever again that I can easily hop on a plane and go see the people and places I love. Every reunion is to be cherished.
I’m old enough now that I don’t really find the nostalgia overwhelming, or even sad. I quite like the person I have grown to be, and I hope the city, too, is hurtling towards something greater and brighter, that it will continue to revel in its marvellous histories and contradictions and the dreams and hopes of the people that live there. And I think it is precisely because we have both changed that there is space to see each other, and ourselves, with new eyes.