London for a Londoner

I made myself an alter ego. Meet Tourist Girl:

While Tourist Girl roams the city with her time freeze power (a camera) and gets excited by silly details (oooooh! A telephone box! A Real One. And it’s red!) the rest of us see it as it is.

Pretend Red Phone Boxes

Instead of looking at the Big Ben and going ooooooh! A CLOCK! The rest of us walk by, to get somewhere, quickly, very quickly because we’re very important and are far too wise and apathetic to get all excited by clocks because they’re big and phone boxes because they’re red.

But through all my hardened London ways, there was something I liked about their childish delight.

So I sent Tourist Girl out to explore. She went on the opentop bus and admired the sights.

I realised the tickets cost £26 and bought some wine instead.

This is Tourist Girl gaily frolicking along Hampstead Heath:

This is me writing essay draft number 214:

For a few weeks I let Tourist Girl put on a French accent and wear a detective style trench coat, while I sat at my desk, busy as usual. Tourist Girl’s adventures slowly crept more and more into my thoughts until I found myself wondering, briefly, how people would look at me if I was wearing a cloak (…hmmmm). Or how people would react when I told them what I did for a living (what? You’re a superhero whose biggest power is getting excited by phone boxes?).

I knew it wasn’t going to work. But I wasn’t going to let a simple matter like that stop me. I donned the robes of Tourist Girl. Translation: I wore what I always wear and used my phone to take photos.

I soon realised that everyone who lives somewhere explores. I had to rethink my plan. Things weren’t looking good. The open top bus company was ignoring my attempts at ticket forgery, and my French accent was all too quickly met with Ah! Tu es Française? Moi aussi!

Fleet Street

Then I struck gold. I could explore the places I walked by every day. Again.

The doorways beckoned. I went into the original Twining’s teashop. Again. And with my camera, it was quite literally a different place. Tourist Girl had the power of making rooms bigger, of putting portraits on the walls that hadn’t been there before, of seeing strange teas that weren’t in boxes, of being excited.

St Dunstan in the East

Art Galleries were no longer just the paintings, but the people looking at the paintings, faintly disturbed by me following them. Tropical gettaways magically appeared in the heart of the city. People got annoyed with me for standing on the wrong side of the escalator. (oh dear. I forgot the word and just had to type ‘stairs that move’ into Google).

Then again, Tourist Girl wasn’t really Tourist Girl. I couldn’t shake that all the places had memories. I couldn’t, much as I wanted, be free from the pressure of deadlines and work in the way Tourist Girl would be. Neither could I get excited by red phone boxes. Even though they were red.

But I had super powers Tourist Girl could only dream of. Super powers like not confusing the words Hungry and Angry. Unless for Italians the two really are the same.

Instead I mix leyendo and liando to proudly inform my Spanish housemate I’ve been rolling joints all day.

Which leads me onto the final twist in this happy ending – in London, the world comes to you:

The End