Goodbye London

Our bags are packed, our gear is on a boat heading towards Melbourne. We've quit our jobs and handed back the keys to our house. There's no turning back now, this thing is happening.

It exciting and it's sad. I fucking love London, really. I know it's not a city for everyone but I've always found it's charm hard to escape. Moreover, four years is a decent amount of time to live anywhere. The connections you grow start to run deep.

There are so many people that have become such important parts of our lives and saying goodbye to them is never easy. But it's so wonderful to see so many people we're leaving in a really good place at the moment. Some much needed stability or exciting chaos on the way - we love so many of you so much and can't wait to put you all up in Melbourne one day.

So now begins the interregnum. This trip marks the strange stateless break in time between our life in London and and the next life phase - the force driving us home kicking and screaming.

I'll miss my Brick Lane bagels, the throb of a pub at 5pm on a Friday. Walking down the street drinking half liter tins of Polish larger that only cost £1.10 and the not unrelated dull hang over that seems to perpetually haunt me. The endless array of events and festivals, restaurants and galleries. Trendy popups and knowing that your favourite musicians live in the city and you can probably catch them at some stage over the next few months for a tenner. Drinking in a pub that Charles de Gaulle's exiled government met in and then walking a few doors down past a building Karl Marx lived in or walking past a memorial to Bertrand Russel just because you're within two blocks of Red Lion square. That life force that London has is ancient. Mosques that have been Synagogues and both Catholic and Protestant churches as well. It's a land enriched by centuries of migration. A place that reaped the enormous benefits of a global empire blissfully ignorant of its genocidal impact on the other side of the world.

Since we arrived I'm older, I'm fatter, I'm probably not any wiser. But this is happening so onward and upwards. I've always been one to look forwards and only ever occasionally glace back. There's no time for nostalgia, crack on, we've got a pretty spectacular holiday waiting for us, stating with a 5:50am flight from Gatwick tomorrow morning.