Lily Tibbitts’ Student Life #144
One of my university friends is from London (I don’t hold it against him – mostly) and came up to Amble with me last year for the Puffin festival.
He’s a city kid through and through and apparently had absolutely no idea how small towns worked, something that I only fully realised when we were on the X18 and he admitted that he assumed all little towns in Northumberland were going to be five wooden sheds in a field. He was joking, I think.
He absolutely loved visiting Amble, though. He loved going to the market and watching the bands play and going down to the beach and going in the sea and immediately getting out again because it was way too cold. I have photos of him with Tommy Noddy and he has a plastic dinosaur he bought from a market stall as a souvenir.
Over Christmas, the same friend invited me down to London for a few days. I’m not a fan of big cities, the South and people who don’t smile at each other in the street, so London isn’t my ideal holiday destination, but I wasn’t about to pass up on free accommodation in London. I was fully expecting to get stuck in horrible crowds and to be missing my phone and wallet by the time I got home, but luckily, I went anyway.
I ended up, shockingly, having a really lovely time. We looked around countless gorgeous Christmas markets and watched little bands perform next to monuments and admired all the Christmas lights (not as good as the Amble ones, obviously).
He has photos of me with red phone boxes, London Bridge and basically any landmark that I could name, and my phone and wallet are still intact.
Amble and London are definitely not the same, (for starters, you couldn’t pay me to live in London), but it was nice to see that we were both a little bit wrong about the place where the other lived. It turns out that small towns are quite nice after all, and London isn’t the hellish concrete rat-maze that I maybe thought it was. Still, it’s better up North.
Lily
