It occurred to me, as we walked home this evening, how alien this landscape sometimes seems. We had been to the Royal standard, where Lyn had visited her bank, and then to a caf we know there. Dan took us a different route home, through a great expanse of tower blocks. I had never seen such a place – there seemed to be hundreds of apartment blocks, each with hundreds of flats. Thousands of people must live there, from all over the earth and each with a different story. I felt, in a way, both amazed and intimidated: its not as if the flats were run down; there was no graffiti or anything. It just occurred to me how far this landscape was from the detached suburban house I grew up in. Of course, I knew such places existed, and I know never to judge people by where they live, but in that moment I realised how very different London is.

We walked on. It was getting dark. The road we were on ran roughly west-east, and was on a bluff so that to the north the land dropped off sharply. Suddenly, looking through the gap between two blocks, I caught sight of the glistening lights of the city: canary wharf, the gurkin, and it was utterly beautiful. This landscape may still sometimes seem alien to me, throbbing at a pace I’m unused to, yet it has a beauty that I’m just beginning to discover. I suppose Walter Benjamin was right when he wrote of cities being a maelstrom; like the flaneur, I now find myself botanising on the asphalt, trying to make sense out of the chaos, and in doing so I realise what an amazing place this really is.