Yesterday morning I was walking along the coast in the dark, under a sky full of stars. Wellies on, mud underfoot, the sea beside me and not a person in sight.
A little later I was at Ronaldsway Airport, which is closer to a bus stop than an airport. My flight left at ten.
By noon I was standing in Victoria Station. About 147,000 people come and go there every day, which is more than live on the entire Isle of Man. Every day, in one station. Over a year, it handles more than eighty times as many passengers as our airport. And Victoria is only the sixth busiest station in the country. Liverpool Street, across town, handles nearly twice as many.
Around me were sirens, traffic, a demonstration, a crew drilling up the road, the smell of food from a dozen directions, and more cultures and ways of dressing than I could take in. Everybody was rushing somewhere, and nobody looked as if they owned a pair of wellies.
I caught myself walking around with a grin on my face, thinking, how on earth did I end up here? Which is a slightly embarrassing thing to think when you have lived in Marseille and Cape Town and are supposed to know your way around a busy city.
But after a while I started wondering about something else. Where do all these people go home to?
I began to look at them differently. The man in the expensive suit. The woman dressed in a way I could not quite place. The road workers with their drills, the lorry drivers stuck in traffic. All of us on the same street for a few seconds, and all of them living lives I knew nothing about. Where would they sleep that night? What would they look forward to when they woke up?
I had no way of knowing, of course. The person walking past me might have been born in London and never wanted to leave. Another might have arrived a few months ago. Someone might be saving up to move somewhere calmer, while the person walking next to them could not imagine living anywhere else.
It made me wonder how much of where we live is a choice, and how much simply happens. Most of us grow up somewhere, find work, meet people, and before long we have built a life around a place.
I know how comfortable I am where I live. On the Isle of Man I can walk along the coast for miles and see nobody at all.
Not everyone would feel that way. A friend of mine who lives in Marseille came to visit and loved it here. But she could never live here. The silence would drive her mad. Some people need a city around them, with all that energy, and I can see why.
That is what I enjoyed most about London. Not the city itself, and not the idea of living there, but the reminder of how many ways there are to live.
I wondered whether any of them would be curious about my life if they could see it. Would they understand the pleasure of an empty coastline on a cold morning? Or would they just think it sounded terribly boring?
Probably some of each. I can live with that. At least nobody has ever started drilling up the road while I was walking along the coast.
Later I was back by the sea, and the only sound was the water coming ashore. It felt entirely familiar. But I was still thinking about all those people in London, each of them going home to a life I knew nothing about.
How on earth did I end up here? I asked it in London, with a grin on my face. I could just as easily ask it on the island, and I have, in The country I left but never left behind.
Breathing in the city for an afternoon is great fun. Living in it is another matter. I am my friend’s mirror image: she cannot live with the silence, and I cannot live without it.
