LONDON

Strange those first few hours in a new place, how they dissolve into days, months...

Paddington Station was our first stop, Heathrow already a mile away. A black cabbie driving us to our small hotel, with twin beds.

Edgware Road, the Arab district. Kebabs, Baclawa, Shisha. Quite unexpected.

Finding an apartment in three days. A place to call home, a room of our own.

London seems like an enormous house, a mansion whose rooms are shared by passers by, people sleeping a night, then moving somewhere else... Europe, or somewhere further away. It is a house full of leaking pipes and rising damp, warm beer, bad coffee, a few showers and many bathtubs, red buses, and the tube vibrating under the floor. It silently screams for a spring clean - but spring comes, and passes, and no cleaning is done. And so it keeps running, creaky and decrepit, hoping for another year...

In the meantime, there is a place to enjoy the sunshine, not too far away. Only a handful of rainy days since we stepped off the plane. Is this London...?

And after a short time has passed, we find ourselves thinly familiar with our house, our street, the bus we catch to work... and we begin to look further afield...

Regents Park. Across the road, between rows of Victorian houses, along Baker Street. Through the gate, past the flower beds of tulips and roses, all in full bloom; the boating lake, the walk bridge, the swans gliding by underneath; squirrels scurrying up tree trunks; the grass scattered with green and white deck chairs. Our backyard.

So while the sun stays shining, and the grey clouds only occasionally hover disdainfully overhead, 

we have a place to rest.