Fall is to fall back in love with London

Last year I quit my job and left London. The plan was to travel for a year, beginning January 2024, but I ended up coming back to the city a lot earlier than expected. I have been writing in here as regularly as possible about my travel experiences – some sort of travel diaries – but somehow, it feels wrong to not write about some of the “present”.

I’ve been back in London for just over three months, with a new job, a new place to live, but with the same challenges. When it comes to the city, the expensive rents, the crowds, the poor public transportation, the time it takes to literally go anywhere… but I’m making an effort to focus on the reasons that have made me love this city, and less on what makes me hate it. My mind is a complicated place to live in. It’s full of ghosts and demons, none of them ever vouching for the most positive inner voices to be heard, often absolutely silenced. So I am writing here about my process of falling back in love, head over heels, for this city.

And one of them is its nature and the wildlife encounters that you can’t miss.

I went back to Richmond Park, one of the most amazing places in London that I had only visited once – in 2015, precisely when I had just moved here, nine years ago. What a lot of people don’t know about London is that it’s not just a concrete jungle – step outside of its centre and you’ll find the most wonderful greenery, untamed forests, and majestic wildlife.

The beginning of Fall is the best time to come visit these places. When it’s not yet too cold, when the days aren’t too dark, and you catch that very specific golden sunlight that makes everything seem like you’re a sepia photograph from the late 1800s.

Love, Nic