I should have lictors marching before me. There should be fanfare as I stand on a triumphal chariot, the Neocrat riding into our new Rome. There would be a slave whispering in my ear, “remember, you are only a man”. Not quite a god, not yet. This is our Heaven on Earth, my friends, and the Neocrats is the softly spoken beginning of an audaciously loud project. But my first assignment is a simple one: London.

It’s raining today, I suppose that goes without saying. My opinions on London have always been strong, ever since I was first exposed to it, around ten years of age. That first visit was all the usual stuff: the Tower and its burghers, the fish & chips without ketchup, the open-backed buses. The next time I saw London was when I moved here, nearly a decade later, emerging from Hammersmith tube station and right into the roundabout, spinning with a circus of cars and people and buses and noise and simply so much bigger than Toronto. I was dazzled, I was hooked.

Today marks almost another decade, not purely in London. I lived in rural England, I lived in Paris, I constantly shook off the grime of the Big Smoke to try somewhere else, if only briefly. But London has an addictive quality, there is something that must be akin to a new shot of heroin for the junkie, when I pull back into Waterloo on the Eurostar, or touch down at Heathrow; even when I trudge in from distant Stanstead after a heady Euroweekend. It’s relief that I feel, installed back amongst the tube delays, the long waits for a bus followed by five in a row, the exorbitance; the character, the total diversity, the détente between oddball Londoners and transient workers.

You can live here for years, get to know your patch, and one day be introduced to somewhere new – for me, right now, it’s Farringdon – and be astounded at all the slivers you never knew, the restaurants you simply must try.

But I’m coming across generically. London is not generic, that is the one quality it can never acquire; much like God being all-virtuous, except for humility. How can He be humble? And how could London be bland?

Oh, Starbucks.

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