I was looking through my blog archive earlier. I often like to look at past entries, just to remind myself what I’ve written and to continue the slow process of putting all the missing links back. This morning I came across this entry from February 2012, about the vastness of London. At the time, I felt like I was living in a vast, sprawling place: London felt huge to me, as though it extended almost to infinity in every direction. Compared to the small Cheshire towns where I grew up, Greater London’s sheer size felt quite incomprehensible.

Yet, since then, London seems to have shrunk. The feeling of vastness which it once had is now no longer there: I have now grown to know this city and how to get around it. I can now get from one side of the metropolis to the other quite easily. Of course, this feeling has no doubt been boosted by improvements in public transport like the Elizabeth Line, but I also think that it helps that I now feel very much at home in London.

Yesterday afternoon for instance, I enjoyed a lovely long trundle to Lewisham, through Deptford and up as far as the south bank. It was a similar trundle to the one I wrote about here. It took two or three hours, but I now feel confident enough to try such long trips. It’s an if I have the whole of humanity on my doorstep waiting for me to explore. Places which once seemed like they were miles away now feel within walking distance, or at most a tube ride away.

At the same time, London still has a type of awesomeness and intrigue which it has always held for me. I still think of it as a microcosm: people from all over the world live here, speaking countless languages representing countless cultures. One of the things which made London feel so vast was this variety, and that has not changed. Yet where once I associated diversity with distance I now tie it to tightness and community. Riding the Jubilee Line this afternoon I heard multiple voices speaking languages from all over the globe.

London is still a microcosm, but perhaps the operative syllable is “micro”. After all, I now have experience of far more geographically sprawling cities than London – Delhi, for instance. Yet the metropolis still has the qualities which made it so beguiling and intriguing when I first moved here, and still make me want to go out and explore it. The difference is, all that wondrous diversity now feels within touching distance, as if I merely need to get in my powerchair to explore the entire globe, or at least one of the greatest cities on it.