I'm not homesick, really, just feeling a wee bit displaced

I fly back to London a week today. I nearly wrote that I was flying home but, since I have rented out my apartment it’s not really true. I did consider keeping a bedroom in my flat just for me, but paying two sets of rent would mean no money for shoes & eating out and, I think, would make me feel like I hadn’t really committed to my new, shiny Manhattan life.

I really am in two minds about this trip. It’s much, much easier for me to feel like New York is where I live when I don’t keep jumping on ‘planes to London. Because there are things that I miss, mainly those that are bound up in a feeling of comfortable familiarity, and they make me ache for the semblance of home.

I hate, hate, hate not having my books, my fabulous bicycle, my kitchen stuff, my beautiful piles of laundered linen, my Riedel wine glasses, my Aeron chair, ALL my clothes around me. At present my possessions are in scattered between a locked cupboard in my flat, my garage, my sister’s hall cupboard and my parent’s loft. And I have absolutely no idea what is where, as I didn’t pack up twelve years of London living in a particularly scientific manner. It also doesn’t help that I keep sending visitors back to London with bags of books and unwanted clothes and God knows where they stash them.

Trying to fit in seeing all my friends(I have 25 people on the list so far) in just five days, interspersed with going to Bristol for a wedding, painting my flat (it’s like the bloody Forth Bridge), meeting my accountant, interviewing Claire Waight Kellor (the reason I am returning), scheduling planning meetings and doing High St press office appointments to see the new season collections for the three big commercial shoots I am styling in August is making my head ache already. It wld be sensible to go back for two weeks and address all this calmly.

But thing is, I don’t want to be in London at the moment. I really, really don’t. I don’t ache for my old life one little bit. I felt like I was a hamster on a treadmill doing same old, same old. I wanted new experiences, new challenges and a new city. And this city happens to suit me just fine.