the milestone

Somehow, despite having moments of just wanting to hide under my doona back home in Melbourne, I've managed to survive 3 months in London without monumentally screwing something up and having to come home with my tail in between my legs, broke and destitute. But I've come to realise that I don't regret for a minute coming over here and without going into superlatives and hyperbole, I'm just starting to open my eyes - to explore, to seek, to challenge, to take on this challenge.

The thing about London is that it provides such a breadth of diversity that you feel like you're always dipping your toes into the water. It's cold and murky underneath (which also seems to fit the description of the mould in my bathroom which I can't seem to remove, despite my energetic scrubbing and vast amounts of chemical cleaners which is now assisting to decompose some dead goldfish flushed down some random London kid's toilet), but once I clear away the perpetual cloud of cynicism that hovers above my head, threatening a good bucketing down of grumpiness, I begin to enjoy myself. Relax a little. Untense the shoulders that every single person who's ever given me a massage has commented about.

Earlier this week there was a Tube strike and I was forced to walk to my connecting station from my office. I was seething that one single solitary union could hold to ransom an entire city of commuters who actually needed to go to work, but the road opened up an incredible view of Westminster Abbey, Big Ben and the London Eye - a 3-in-1 deal where tourists can go and tick off their checklist. Regardless of the fact that the road to Big Ben was swarming with tourists, I looked up into the pretty blue sky and was mesmerised by the reflection of Big Ben in all it's golden glory. It is a truly stunning monument when bathed the sunlight. And it struck me that I can walk down this road everyday just to go to work.

Even better than the view however, is having friends from Melbourne move to London. My mate from Melbourne, Rob has landed in London after a wikid 6 months or so in South America. For those that don't know Rob, he's the quintessential (pun intended, for those who know him) funnyman, the man can't stop being amusing (and the type of bloke, I suspect, I wouldn't have been able to control in class with a smidgen of dignity had I been his school teacher). Some of my colleagues recommended that we head down to Clapham for a few pints, and so we did. But there the disappointment started where both of us had envisaged pub after bar after pub, only to find ourselves desperately searching for a pub, any pub, and even that one there with the old men smoking outside and the Sky TV turned on inside full blast with a man commentating on comments about the football scores.

Just on drinking. I was speaking to a random Londoner who had a theory that Australia was akin to being an adolescent boy. His comment that our national fixation seemed to be on nothing else but beer, women and football drew nothing but applause from me (as we both were as bored with our codes of football as our respective countries were fixated on it). Needless to say, I was too polite to answer back that his country also had a fixation on beer, women and football as well, and one would only need to look at the state of their News Corp-published newspapers to come to that nary a conclusion.

Which brings about the question: is London more cultural than Melbourne? Even in a comparison with Melbourne (being the culture-capital of Australia), London without doubt has more for the non-neanderthal/heathen/philistines like myself. Last weekend I was privileged to see an exhibition of the World Press Photographer of the Year competition. It was without doubt, the most challenging, thought-provoking and beautiful collection of photography I have ever seen. There were a few photos where I almost threw up. The cruel, unjust and bloody world we live in was unflinchingly displayed in front of us. Stark. In colour. And in black and white. The civil wars. The war. The bombs. And the aftermath of it all. But as we scratch under the surface of that mould in my bathroom, we find the untold beauty of photos of the ordinariness of New Yorkers on their walk to work, of men praying before their football match, of thousands of penguins on the march in a slowly melting Arctic.

But then again, I did have an excellent yum cha before the exhibition, so perhaps the char siu bao was clouding my views? Me thinks it's time to check.