I love how the plane feels as if it is being pushed up from behind as it leaves Dublin.
I love the whoosh of dusty air that hits your eyes as the Tube pulls up to the platform.
I love the sense of wonder the first time you see the Shard. If the rain isn't coming down in italics you stand mesmerised as waves of hands grasp Evening Standards.
Behind the hoarding they hammer and clatter all night on the Crossrail and orange galoshes clamber up steps as if returning from lobster fishing.
All human life is here, the Hummers and the white stretch limos, and the sports cars with personalised plates opposite the sexual-diseases unit at Guy’s Hospital, and just down the river, Greenwich, GMT.
I have come to study wine. London feels like the centre of the world; winemakers and critics congregate here. I love the way you clear French passport control at St Pancras International station, or the way you can harvest grapes in Kent and be back at London Bridge an hour later, the mud still on your boots.
Wine tasting reminds me of Seamus Heaney’s blackberry picking. I have come to London to write about home. I don’t write about London while I’m living here, so I stuff cards and notes into plastic bags like a pathologist collecting samples.
London exhausts you; everyone seems to be wearing sports gear or learning their lines. I love the way you come out of the station disoriented, your eyes blinking into the sunshine to the sound of taxis’ engines turning over; you feel as if you’re running to stand still.
I learn about soil and rock types and root depth. I spend too much time underground. “Daddy, we’re going sideways,” says a child on the Tube. Once, on the Heathrow Express, a woman invited me to house-sit; I lived there for two summers.
Home is everywhere: Fingal Ferguson’s salami on menus, Irish names on the cranes towering over the skyline.
I imagine that I blend in, but I’m usually the only one at yoga with no tattoos.
I love the way you can go to a college reunion and hear accents just like yours before dissolving back into the city.
The upward motion as the plane heads home reminds me of the ticks of approval I put on student papers, the marks I need to see from my PhD supervisor.
I don’t miss things until I hear them: the ding of the Luas, the flap of swans’ wings as they take off from the pond in Herbert Park in Dublin.
I love the sense of being in both places and being in neither, in transit.
But I still struggle with the distance relationship. I wonder what I’m missing, and I long for weekends or work trips.
“You won’t fit in when you go back,” a consultant told me years ago, while I was working on secondment. “It’s like taking a letter out of an envelope: it doesn’t go back in the way it came out.”
