He knows it’s a far out city, but Marius Holtan is also made edgy by London’s hot-and-cold stare.
I am two months in to my new life in London, and as the weather turns for the worse, I wonder if London is as friendly as I first thought.
You Londoners greet tourists superbly; you are masters at queuing, and you are polite — but you are also stressed, stuck up and cold.
The weather is bi-polar — it can be summer in October and winter in July; and so is the psyche of this city.
The hardest part of moving to a new place is the lack of familiarity. You know nothing and no one, and the only way to change that is by engaging with the community.
Just get out there, right?
But friendly faces can be few and far between — I sometimes seek comfort in chit-chat with cafeteria cashiers, but I am soon made to appreciate that I can’t be everyone’s cup of tea.
The next obstacle is to break the tourist-barrier — an imaginary wall separating the sturdy natives from gullible visitors; because grazing the surface will never make you feel at home.
So you try to fight your way past the tea-drinking, scones-eating Royalist pub-goers to something real – and what you find are unexpectedly high rates of unemployment, homelessness and crime.
In the two months since my feet touched the tarmac, London has made me feel over-privileged, underestimated and unwelcome.
But bearing in mind that an estimated 37 per cent of today’s Londoners were born outside the UK, I know I am not alone in having these thoughts; and I also know that the majority of these incomers have found a way to make a home here.
Just, I hope, like me.
After all, the point of being in a mega-city is that this is where you can have it all: from muggers to moguls; grimy to gorgeous.
Sometimes I need a reminder – a smile from a stranger or finding a new café, but even when I feel left out, this is where I chose to live, this is what I wanted, and I’ll admit that London brings me more joys than sorrows.