London is a shouting city.
Being a country girl at heart (although if anyone thinks being a teenager in the depths of the countryside, with one bus a week, and miles of fields between you and, well, anything is romantic they have been seriously misinformed) my eyes sometimes ache for green fields and a night sky so clear and black it's as though you are standing at the edge of space.
Every possible surface in London screams to be read. Adverts exhort you to indulge in razors, in books, in 3-for-2s, in 'genuine pre-ops'. Signs inform you where to sit, where to park, where not to chain your bicycle, what to recycle, to turn left, to not enter here or there. Restaurants and bars beckon you in, warning notices keep you out. Even the people are blazoned with brands and logos. There are a thousand road signs whispering of Victorian commerce and ancient byways.
Words are my thing, I get anxious without a bedside book or even a cereal packet to read in the mornings, and a stop-start bus or broken tube is inhuman enough with your face wedged against someone else's shoulder and their handbag in your spine without a book to carry you away. But sometimes, there are too many words.
