listening to the Les Miz soundtrack makes me miss London so much. the first day: breakfast at a cosy cafe place opposite our hotel, hopping onto the tube to UCL, met Eve, then met parents at Hyde Park for Winter Wonderland. at night Gus and I took a stroll on our own. that is perhaps how i remember it, patches of significant memories, the heat of my coffee on a cold night on a bench outside the tube station, the passing of bright red buses and the similarly coloured phonebooths splattered with porn, beef goulash in a park transformed for christmas. feels like only yesterday these things happened but so intangible, only makes the missing worse. i wish i grew up in London, wish that being there didn't make me feel like i've left something behind here. i said to Gus, let's work here once we've graduated. i mean it. jealous of students studying in London not because the schools are good, but because London is London and there's so much space in my heart for it. for the busker with an amazing voice at Piccadilly station, for the kindest strangers we met on the tube, for the sniffling and tearing you can hear throughout the Queen's Theatre at the end of Les Mis, for the beautiful buildings and their colonial architecture, for a city bustling with life, energy, arts, culture, sport, charm and wit beneath the blanket of clouds, rain and limited sunshine.