I now think I’m going to make a conscious effort to get out of London a bit more. That probably sounds a bit weird, but for the last fifteen years or so my entire world has sort of been bounded by the capital. Of course, there have certainly been occasions when I have ventured beyond the M25, most notably my trips abroad; yet my day to day life seems to have been very London-centric. I realised recently that I can easily go for weeks and even months without going outside of the encircling motorway. To be honest it seemed like anywhere outside London would be too far away to reach, or that I would be taking a risk heading anywhere not under the jurisdiction of TfL. There was also a small, nagging voice in the back of my mind protesting that wanting to venture outside of London would be a sign that I no longer loved London or thought it the greatest city on earth.

However, as incredible as I still think London is, I’m becoming more and more aware that there is more to life than just one metropolis. I now feel a real urge to go beyond its limits a bit more. My daily trundles for the last fifteen years have broadly been a matter of heading to the same places within the city: as incredible as that once was, it also now has a faint feeling of captivity. It is almost as if they are becoming too familiar, too well known, and as bright and glittering and fabulous as they may be, too dull.

Part of me now feels that there must be places outside of London I can get to, beyond the tarmac circle of the M25. Greener, quieter places; places far from the hubbub of traffic and the chatter of countless people. Quaint little villages and market towns, connected via lanes winding through fields. The problem is as it always has been: London is so huge that actually getting outside of the city just using public transport takes so long that it becomes unpractical for me to try to get anywhere before I have to start heading home. Yesterday, for example, it took me an entire afternoon to get to the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent and back, using two buses. Obviously if public transport was a bit better I would have had less of a problem; but even so I now really want to find more ways of getting outside this vast urban sprawl. As I wrote a couple of days ago, thanks largely to the Elisabeth Line, getting across London and particularly into the city centre is now extremely easy; yet I now feel a growing urge to get out of the metropolis and into landscapes more akin to those I grew up with a bit more.