It has taken two-and-a-half years, but I have finally crossed the Rubicon and feel a stranger in the city that was home for more than two decades.
In London for a book launch last month, it became horribly apparent that things had moved on without me. Never a Pret a Manger where I left one. New stops popping up on the digital signs of the Northern Line in an unsettling, slightly creepy kind of way – like something from a Ray Bradbury short story. Topshop, the mothership of my adolescence, gone from Oxford Circus – and as for the “Lizzie Line”: well, possibly my inverted commas indicate that the idea of negotiating it makes me feel like a dowager throwing up her hands when someone mentions “The Facebook”.
