Last updated on June 27, 2022
Tonight I’ll see six friends. We’ll eat at a pop-up Syrian restaurant then head to our local that shares my name. Friends and a local pub. We’re home again.
We’ve seen a lot of friends and family these past few weeks – friends from school, friends from uni, cousins, the type of friends you keep for life. Time is no barrier with these people. We laugh, we leave, we return and we laugh again. These are the ones we’ll love for life.
These are the ones we missed. When we walked through a jungle, ate an exotic meal or stared at stars from the sand. These are the ones we wished were there.
Travel is a love, but not one that trumps our friends, nor one that trumps our family. Three years have taught us this.
We found our base
Wanderlust lives in us. It’ll continue to take us places for life. We’re not ones to stay stock still. But nor are we perpetual movers. We want community. We want a home. And we want to be near these people. We want to be a part of their lives as they live it, not onlookers from afar.
There are friends to be made everywhere. We have friends throughout the world, but many of them, like us, are nomads. There is nowhere in the world that we have a higher concentration of people we love than here in London and nearby.
We wish for the sun, we wish for the bikes of Berlin, we wish for mountains, we wish for the vibes and people of San Pancho, we wish for a city that doesn’t exist. London has its shortcomings. It’s busy, it can be grey, it thrives on ambition. If you’re not careful, it wears you down. But it’s also the first place I made my own home, the place I dreamed of through my youth, where I lived through my 20s, and the place where I first met Steve. I love London. Its been generous to me and it still continues to give. It’s an exciting place to be. And I’m proud to call it home.
Home again
Today I’m writing this to you from my own house. It’s the sofa I sat on when writing my resignation letter, the place where we booked our one-way flights and somewhere I once thought I’d never return to. But the person sitting here now is different. I no longer feel trapped. I know it’s possible to get up and go. But right now, there’s no place I’d rather be than here. This is the place I choose. A sofa in Peckham Rye, waiting for a friends’ knock on the door.
Rest assured we are not stopping travelling altogether. London will simply be our base. In fact, I can tell you now that we’re going away for the whole of December to somewhere far away that I’ve never been to before. I’m about to write a letter to you all about it now. Newsletter subscribers, you’ll be getting that note soon, along with some more details about what bought us back to London, and our usual monthly dose of links. You can sign up to the newsletter here.