katie writes stuff

I've been thinking this week, about being a Londoner.

I wasn’t born there, and I no longer live there, but I experienced a weird feeling of being home when I stepped off my coach at Victoria on Saturday. I first declared that city my second home half a decade ago, and it feels like nothing and everything has changed.

I was so engrossed in my book that I hadn't noticed our pace slow as we left the motorway, and I looked up and out of the window somewhere near Finsbury Park, and seeing a familiar red bus, and roundels everywhere, and I felt this sense of... happiness, and calm.

And when I think about what people say "makes" a Londoner, it's the daft things.

It's knowing where to stand on the Tube platform, so that when you get off the train again you can make your escape quickly.

It's instinctively knowing where your Oyster is at all times.

It's knowing that if you want to change from the Victoria to Northern line, you should avoid Euston at all costs and go for Warren St instead.

It's looking at the lights lining the Thames after the sun has set, and loving them like you would stars in the country.

It's being defensive about which side of the river is better - south, obviously. Even though there's dragons.

It's the comforting rumble of the Tube trains you profess to hate (and your Twitter app remembering the hashtag #TfaiL, for ease of making your friends in other cities cringe and sigh...)

I'll always be a Manc, but I reckon I'm still a Londoner too, in a small way.

Even if I do make eye contact with people on the bus now and again.

I've been on this planet almost 23 years, and in that time, I've lived in five different towns and cities, and visited many more, and I just keep falling in love with places. I'm hopeless for it. It first happened in the Goyt Valley when I was six, sitting there and watching the river churn over the weir. As I grew older, Manchester claimed my heart, and then followed Pembrokeshire and the North Yorkshire coast, Oxford and Cambridge, London... London. I've had a secret crush on London for years, and then five months ago, I was given the chance to go anywhere I felt like, and I thought about it hard, but in the end, I knew there was only one choice. I have never felt quite so at home as I do here.

Foursquare is my latest fun timewaster: it's a game which purports to be about finding new ways to explore your city but is really just a pointless exercise in wasting your iPhone battery checking into the places you visit and collecting badges for things like going to three places with photobooths or spending a lot of time at the gym. If you check into a place more than anybody else, you become the mayor and get a little crown next to your name when you visit.

On the web interface, you can add tags to different places which help you get badges, and to "let people know what they can expect to find". Some choice tags from the page for London Bridge train station: delays, despair, insanity, pain, stare into the abyss and suffering.

You can also add "things to do" at various places; a few of the more hilarious ones include:

• "Resist the urge to madly punch other passengers during the morning commute."
• "Abandon hope all ye who enter here."
• During peak hours, wear a pair of Heelys or a jet pack to enhance & hasten your commute.

Whoever said Londoners don't have a sense of humour? :-)