is the city where the streets meet the sky in a grey agreement. The fierce love I hold for this city overwhelms me.

The grey sky… to describe it as grey would be acceptable once. The second time it’s an amateur watercolour painted too heavy and layered, a sausage-and-mash of the harshest muddy blue and black, smokey tones that lose definition and blend blend blend until the sky emerges. The buildings like it, I can tell – by the way they their mirrored faces welcome the clouds and rain and reflect the light, inviting them into the traffic. The bright cranes are in direct conflict with the sky – mechanical giraffes gracefully mating across afternoon windows. How many more metaphors can this city take?

Already swelling up to the brim with foreign matter. Already weary with tomorrow, the daily congregation of salmon, filing upstream on escalators. Sardine situations. Close up underground polaroids of fragmented commuters, burnt onto my memory in the harsh tungsten lights.

I want to blend in with the stations and Tesco’s and five a.m. pigeons. It glows, with pride and council housing. Explodes at me with tree blossoms at the start of spring, with embankment glitter on a sunny evening, the air smelling like rough jazz and overwhelming caramel.

I look around and see little bits of love happening. Amazing people you would, but won’t get the chance to, as they’re leaving in a day or in a month or a moment – king-crossing on a slip of parallell universe, a sliver of acknowledgment of an hour in this lifetime that meant more – the comedown. London’s gracious payback for making you so high.