Into exile – the adventure begins.

A lot has happened in the, now almost five, months since Green Park tube station spat me out on to the streets of London in an untidy pile of bags and gin tinged, jet-lagged optimism.

A month earlier, I sold almost everything I owned, packed a couple of bags and flew to Montreal in search of inspiration and an adventure with which to punctuate my life in Cambridge.

The idea was, that after a month immersed in one of Canada’s most bohemian and creative cities, I would start a new life, refreshed and invigorated, as an aspiring journalist in London.

A friend from my university days in Reading, and a born and bred Londoner met me at Green Park after my clumsy arrival. He guffawed at the sight of my new “hipster” Montreal inspired fringe and reticently carried my lightest bag to the cheapest pub in Soho.

Two days of relative inebriation ensued before the fog lifted on my new raison d’être. But when it lifted, it really lifted. Not just from the past couple of days but from years of indecisive, over-familiar, complacency.

Seemingly, in a flash I had a job in a pub that is stumbling distance from the one I arrived at with all my bags on my first day. I arranged an internship at The News of the World and set about making London home. Literally. All of London.

Sofa surfing round friends houses all over the city I covered almost every corner of our fair capital in a just a few months, from Angel to Brixton, Deptford to Crouch End, Soho to Walthamstow. No tube line has been unexplored, my A-Z bears the scars of months of overuse, with coffee rings marking the pages on which I lost my way and had to pause to regroup at Café Nero.

This week though, I’ve settled down at last. Today I came “home” for the first time to a modest room in a shared house in Queens Park. I probably won’t pack my bags again for a while, at least until after the summer. I’m a short amble from Portobello Road, Notting Hill, and Kensington and I intend to stay long enough to explore.

I had a chance to ponder the notion of “home” this evening as I walked to the supermarket, which takes me past the canal. The minute I saw the houseboats, one invitingly lit up with fairy lights, I almost felt that I could have been back in Cambridge, walking past the boats moored beside Midsummer Common.

Back at home this evening I was thinking about Cambridge’s pervasive grasp on my life, its enduring presence. I wondered if perhaps Cambridge informs my personality to such a degree it also decided where I live now.

No sooner have I decided to settle down in West London, than I find myself sharing the house with someone that, though we only met for the first time a week ago, grew up not under the tolling of Bow Bells or Big Ben, but the hymns of Kings College, just like me.