You can take the girl out of the city….

Following my recent move to Poole - I say recent but it has actually now been a full five months - I have been thinking a lot about new beginnings. In the last few months, some huge changes have occurred in my life and my response to them has given me food for thought, in addition to greater self-insight.

From September 2003 until January of this year, I had been a resident of Marylebone in Central London. This corresponded to the period between my 33rd and 41st birthdays (ouch, it kind of hurt to admit to that last one!). So it is accurate to say that for most of my thirties I was a city girl, living the London life and all that it encompasses. However, the fact of the matter is that I have never considered myself to be a city girl and, although I spent the best part of a decade in the capital, I had also never thought of myself as an honorary Londoner.  But, since moving to the South West certain things have given me cause to re-evaluate my own assumptions about where I belong and what defines me.

It is true to say that over time, the environment we inhabit tends to mould our behaviour and attitudes - often without us being fully conscious of it. So, as a thirty something, unmarried and relatively young woman living in Marylebone, I was bound to be shaped to some extent by the place I was living in and the kind of people in my immediate circle.  But until I moved south, I hadn’t realised just how much London (or perhaps I should say Marylebone) had become a part of my inner landscape.

Here are some things I have noticed which would seem to prove my point. To start with, I walk like a Londoner: eyes fixed determinedly on some indiscriminate point on the horizon, I move at a no-nonsense pace (brisk would be an understatement) whilst my feet instinctively negotiate their way through traffic – both human and vehicular - as if it were not even there. Call out my name or try to meet my gaze and I will not even register you on my radar. When I walk I am not merely walking: I am a woman on a mission to reach her destination – always in a hurry even when I am not – and woe betide anyone who tries to catch my attention or block my path! I had never really noticed this small and seemingly irrelevant fact about myself until I moved to Poole where the age of the average resident is somewhere around mid 60 and people tend to walk at a more leisurely pace!

Then there is coffee. If you can work out where someone is from based on the coffee they drink, then I am definitely from the capital of this great land. You might think that a cappuccino is a cappuccino wherever you go - and London can hardly claim to be the capital of cappuccino! – however, I don’t drink any old cappuccino; I drink the Café Rouge variety – exclusively! This probably makes me sound like a snob but so be it, I confess that I am; but only when it comes to coffee. The fact is that I can’t drink any other coffee than the kind they serve in Café Rouge and frankly to call it coffee is to do it a disservice: it is, in fact, perfection in a cup!

Now you may quite rightly say that Café Rouge is not exclusive to London, and you would be right; but unfortunately they don’t make it the same way outside the capital. I should know because shortly after moving to Poole I was overjoyed to discover a branch of my favourite cafe in Westbourne. By this stage I had virtually given up trying to find a decent cup of coffee anywhere in Bournemouth or Poole (apparently Westbourne is the only place for miles around to have a Café Rouge) so you can imagine my delight when I just happened across it en route to Christchurch. Sadly my joy was short-lived: the cappuccino, when it was served, was tepid and flat with none of its customary rich, velvety texture and taste. However, this was not the only way in which Café Rouge failed to meet my expectations. I detected that something was lacking in the general ambience of the place: it lacked the buzz and upbeat glamour of its London cousin. In short, it was – dare I say it? – somewhat provincial, both in appearance and atmosphere.

These are but two seemingly trivial examples that identify me with the capital but I have also discovered a myriad of others. So it seems to me that when we move out of our habitual environment we often discover certain key things about ourselves that had previously escaped our notice. It is really only then that we begin to see ourselves as others must surely see us because we no longer blend in; on the contrary, we stand out.

To give a final example,  I only really became aware of my inherent 'Englishness' – something that I had previously vigorously denied and disowned – when I moved to Peru. Strange as it may sound, it wasn’t until I started living in Latin America that I realised that certain aspects of my personality identify me with the land where I was born. For example, I have an ironic sense of humour; a sense of humour that, sadly, no-one else in that vast territory seemed to understand! So I  guess what I have realised in recent weeks is that there is some truth in the old adage that you can take the girl out of the city but you can’t take the city out of the girl!