This week, I have suddenly realised, marked the sixth anniversary of my arrival to London with two enormous suitcases, a boyfriend, an acceptance letter to a postgraduate course, and the nebulous ambition of a 22-year-old to carve out some kind of career in ‘the media’. My then-boyfriend’s mother attempted to charm the woman at the check-in desk into letting us through without charging us for our overweight luggage by complimenting her on the diamond that she had glued to one of her front teeth. The technique failed – then-boyfriend and I paid something like eighty euros between us – and as we walked towards the security line, we all agreed that diamonds glued on teeth are not nice at all.
Six years is not what I had in mind: one, maybe two were my intention. But when things that I could not control intervened and I got a job offer in New York in 2005, I surprised myself by knowing, unequivocally, that I should turn it down: I did not want to leave. One morning, I have said since what seemed then to be a very strange decision, I will wake up and be certain that it is time for me to go back to the States, and I will go. But, curiously enough, it hasn’t happened yet: having lived all of my real adult life here, I’m more of a Londoner than anything else.
