London is such a mood of a city.

I used to think it was unfriendly, but it isn’t really. It just lets you choose how you want to interact with it.

You can choose to wander around in the early morning, with the sunlight glinting off the glass and metal, before the city is loud. And you can choose to head into the crowds and markets and enjoy how there’s so much life all around you. And you can choose to walk back from the office in the dark of winter and marvel at the thousands of lights in hundreds of windows.

But I appreciate London the most when it is raining. When I am done with my day and no-one is waiting for me. When no one in the city knows me, or needs me until the morning. And on those days, I put my headphones in and disappear.

Everyone on the Underground is Just Passing Through.

It’s a fantastically complex web of lines and connections – all neatly colour-coded so you can hop from line to line, platform to platform, travel in zig-zags across the city without ever emerging into the light. It’s the same colour at 5am before coffee as it is at 10pm after too much wine. And it’s consistent and familiar and everything is labelled. You can get anywhere, even if you’ve never been there before.

But you can’t stay. You can’t be still. It’s like the two of pentacles – the only constant is change.

It only works in the weeks when I’m on my own. It’s transient that way. Catching the tube to go to dinner is an entirely difference experience – convenience and speed, the most efficient route from one place to another.

But when you have no particular drive to be anywhere other than not where you started from, the Underground feels different.

It’s not like feeling lost. It’s a feeling of being unanswerable to anyone for a moment. Like in the time between leaving and arriving, I don’t belong to anyone but myself. My time doesn’t need to be accounted for. I’m not an ambassador for anyone or anything. I get to just… be. And that’s its own kind of magic.