My Gateway Drug

    A common theme with addiction is the idea of the gateway drug. That drug that got it all started. This drug is the users’ vice of choice and generally a vice that leads down the slippery slope of darker and deeper depravity. With that said, as a self confessed addict of travelling, my gate way drug has always been London. From the first time I saw her wide boulevards, packed streets, and diverse population I was hooked. It was sensory overload... Now time and time again as a new travel plan is hatched, I find it always begins in London than branches out.  Like any addict a compulsion draws me back each time. I’m powerless to resist.

       “Only a boring person would get bored in London.” I remember saying once to one of the cities detractors. There’s so much there. I was lucky enough to have lived all over the city. First off, anywhere you are there’s always a local pub filled with characters. In the UK, unlike Canada, the local drunk is given respect for their ability to provide drunken lore and impromptu, if occasionally misguided, conversation. As variety is the spice of life if local isn’t your thing there are countless distinct areas to go to. To name but a few, maybe you’ll find yourself in the twisting streets of Soho with London’s cool kids. Be warned though one Soho Street will have the city’s trendiest bars while the next maybe littered with prostitutes and drug dealers. Then there’s the alternative, bohemian vibe of Camden for live music and a less style conscious evening. For more conservative fare one could check into anyone of the traditional to hyper modern bars and pubs dotting around Piccadilly Circus, the Strand, and Covenant Garden. Really the options are as vast as ones imagination and willingness to try new places.

    “Every type of person under the sun is here... Honestly, per capita for every single person you meet– there’s just a higher chance than anywhere else they’ll be interesting.” My words from nine years back to a South African friend. I know it couldn’t have changed. In central London the talk isn’t of family, cars, or mortgages – it’s of artistic projects, career, and where the sick party is that weekend. In my limited time in the belly of the lion I met artists, millionaires, writers, record executives, raga bond – but chatty homeless people, backpackers from every country, cocky Fleet Street suits, uber hipsters, eastern Europeans with dreams, expat Western Europeans, ex convicts trying for a new start, a group of rough middle aged Millwall Football club supporters, a mentally unstable Scottish religious fanatic, and even Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rosdale. The list could go on and on... 

       As an addict I could indulge myself and descend further into a bender of description for London the place that has my heart. Instead I’ll leave it at this quick blurry snap shot; a snap shot of the variety that your mind’s eye might have trying to recall a walk down Oxford Street an hour previous. Maybe a mere Canadian mind is unqualified to capture the truth of London?... though really no single mind could capture it all in its full cosmopolitan glory. The reality and the irony is that London is lived not remembered – the London experience can only truly exist right in the moment. This leaves me in a never ending  Sisyphean circle of seeing it, basking in it, leaving then trying to remember as it fades and having to return again.  For that reason London always will be my gateway drug...