three years

It's been three years now that I've lived in London. Time has passed as quickly as time tends to pass when you're doing something else but waiting for it to pass. Three years is not the world, but it's not nothing either. Three years is substantial time. How about a look back?

This blog is a good place to start – or the only one if you don't have access to my email archive or secret diary. I suggest the obvious: July 2007. What I find most amazing is the enthusiasm and excitement I felt when I moved to London. At the time, this was the only possible reaction to the mind-boggling scale of the city, the only way of coping with the difference to sleepy Grenoble or Salt Lake City, the towns that came before.

Now I've got settled and London is my home. I don't walk around mouth agape anymore. (Only tourists' heads turn at the extraordinary here.) I navigate the maze of craziness with nimble confidence. The novelty of the place has worn thin, and that worries me a bit. London doesn't stand still; it's a city that undergoes continuous and unconscious redefinition. Many aspects of the city are so different from what they looked three years ago, they could be a different city altogether.

The East has developed beyond belief. The area that will house the 2012 Summer Olympics was just a post-industrial wasteland veined with canals. Now it's a fenced-off construction site nearing completion with countless sparkling businesses sprouting in the immediate vicinity.

Spitalfields Market has lots its soul and most appeal after a recent refurbish- and embellishment. It's the good fortune of the area that The Old Truman Brewery, just a few minutes away, more than makes up for the loss. Camden Town Market (recently domesticated and defanged) and Portobello Road (all but committed to the same fate) have no sidekick. They anchor their area and draw thousands. But their quirkiness is gone; their creativity and wackiness are driven out. The tourists will keep coming for a few years but their numbers will shrink as they see through the bland commercialization of what used to be defining features of London's allure.

All over town, construction is still going strong. Landlords spruce up their properties (just not the one I'm in), developers pull glass and steel into the sky, and the Tate is expanding both of their galleries. Ignore a neighborhood for a few months and you're unlikely to remember you've ever been there when you return. The same amnesia can befall you just outside your door when another quiet restaurant has been replace by a new one, bright yellow sign and all. I don't even want to know what Shepherd's Bush look like now, seven months after I've moved away.

London is dynamic, London changes, London renews itself – which makes it all the more worrying that I'm sliding into some ill-defined been-there, seen-that attitude. While the thrill is far from gone, it's certainly been a bit dulled, and other ideas and temptations tickle my imagination. Is it age that's driving me to more peaceful quarters, to quieter pastures? Maybe. But maybe it's just that I'm getting restless, that three years is enough time spent in one place.