Could be a product, a type of shop, a service, food from back home, anything. I've lived here 8 years and still end up ordering certain things from abroad or just going without.
What's the thing you keep looking for and never find, or can only get at a silly price or with a three week wait?
The unwritten ones. Not queuing, everyone knows that one. I mean the things you only learn by getting them slightly wrong in front of someone.
I moved here from Mumbai and it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out that “we should do this again sometime” is usually just a polite way to end an evening. Or that “not to worry” can mean anything from genuinely not worrying to being quite annoyed with you.
What’s yours? Either the rule you had to learn the hard way, or the one you follow without ever having been told.
Currently on a long haul flight and the woman in the seat right next to me has taken her shoes off, which fine, whatever, it’s a long flight. But she has then stretched her BARE feet forward into MY footwell. Not near it. In it. Toes out, sole up, catching the sunlight like she’s on a beach in Marbella.
Her shoes are just sitting there next to my seat like they live here now.
I genuinely don’t understand what goes through someone’s head. You’re in a metal tube with 250 strangers, not your living room. At minimum put socks on. At absolute minimum keep your feet in your own postcode.
I’ve still got hours left of this and every time I look down, there they are. Has anyone else dealt with this? And more importantly, how do you actually tell someone they’re being gross without starting a mid-air incident? I need her to put her feet away for my sake and honestly for her own dignity too.
UPDATE:: There is something astonishingly wrong with you people for not seeing how this is absolutely disgusting
Update::: just realised you lot are mostly American, no wonder. Wrong crowd
Last update: signing off now. May your flights be long and your seatmates barefoot, since apparently that’s what you all want x
Been wearing mine constantly and still get compliments, but I’ve seen people say the hype’s died. Those who have them, are you still reaching for them or have they been retired to the wardrobe?
Everyone’s doing the airport-look-but-make-it-casual, cooking reels, “I’m just like you” thing now. Who’s convincing and who’s obviously got a whole team behind it?
I’m not even English. I moved to London eight years ago, and somewhere along the way this city’s heartbeat became mine too.
Tonight I watched England lose in the final minutes of a World Cup semi-final, and I felt it like everyone around me did. The pub went silent. Grown men had their heads in their hands. Strangers who had been hugging an hour earlier just quietly filed out into the night.
They were five minutes away. Five minutes from a first final since 1966, and it slipped away.
What struck me most walking home wasn’t the loss itself, it was the collective grief of an entire city. Millions of people, all hoping for the same thing, all heartbroken together. There’s something strangely beautiful about that, even when it hurts.
You don’t have to be born somewhere to break your heart over it. London, I’m sad with you today. It should have come home. 💔🏴
This morning at the station, a woman in stiletto heels stepped right on my foot. Properly stamped, it hurt. She turned around, ready to apologise, looked at my face, and the apology just… deflated. A mumbled half word and she was gone.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But when you’re an immigrant, you notice the difference between the sorry people give each other and the sorry you get. It happens in tiny doses, a colder tone, a shorter apology, and each one on its own is deniable.
Anyone else who moved here experienced this? The small stuff, not the big obvious stuff. I’m curious whether it’s just me or whether other people clock it too.
Was in Soho this evening and watched someone fill their bag in a shop and stroll straight out the door. No alarm, no security, staff didn’t even look up. It was so casual I almost doubted what I’d seen.
Is this just accepted now? Do these people ever actually get caught, or have shops fully given up? Genuinely asking because the staff’s complete non-reaction was the strangest part.
I love London !!!!
HAPPY PRIDE TO ALL THOSE WHO CELEBRATE. YOU ANGELS
Hi! I’m a woman in my late 20s based in north London (Finchley area) hoping to meet some genuine new friends, ideally other girls around 25 to 30 or a similar stage of life.
I work from home, which I do love, but it means my days can get really isolated and any socialising has to be on purpose rather than just happening naturally. A lot of my close friends are at a different stage now, settled with partners and busy lives, so I’m keen to meet people who are also up for actually doing things together.
The kind of stuff I’m into: wandering markets, brunch, art and exhibitions, getting dressed up and taking nice pics, and just generally doing fun girly things and getting out of the flat. Basically looking for the kind of friends you can both have a proper laugh with and make plans with.
If this sounds like you, send me a message, would genuinely love to meet some new people. 😊
Hi! I’m a woman in my late 20s based in north London (Finchley area) hoping to meet some genuine new friends, ideally other girls around 25 to 30 or a similar stage of life.
I work from home, which I do love, but it means my days can get really isolated and any socialising has to be on purpose rather than just happening naturally. A lot of my close friends are at a different stage now, settled with partners and busy lives, so I’m keen to meet people who are also up for actually doing things together.
The kind of stuff I’m into: wandering markets, brunch, art and exhibitions, getting dressed up and taking nice pics, and just generally doing fun girly things and getting out of the flat. Basically looking for the kind of friends you can both have a proper laugh with and make plans with.
If this sounds like you, send me a message, would genuinely love to meet some new people. 😊
I moved here from Mumbai and I'm long enough in now that the novelty's gone and the honest opinions have set in. Some things genuinely changed how I think - the way a whole bus queue just forms itself with no one in charge, the fact that you can be completely left alone if you want to be. After a city where you're never alone, that was a relief before it became a kind of loneliness.
But a few things I still can't get past:
\- The flakiness. People will "definitely" make plans and then it's three cancelled coffees and a year goes by. I came from a place where someone just turns up at your door. Here you need a calendar invite to see a friend.
\- For a city this wealthy, I expected it to be cleaner than it is- the pavements, the bins, the rats near the stations. Not saying it’s worse than where I’m from, just that the money doesn’t seem to reach the street.
\- Everyone's polite and nobody's warm. Took me years to understand those aren't the same thing.
So, fellow immigrants:
\- What did London do BETTER than where you came from that you didn't expect?
\- What's the one thing you still can't adjust to?
\- Did you ever crack the making-friends-as-an-adult thing, or did you just stop trying?
Not an ungrateful "this place is rubbish" post, I chose to be here and I'm staying. Just curious whether the things I notice are universal or just me.
I’ve been away a while and every time I’m back I notice things I was blind to when I lived here full-time. Some of it is the stuff everyone moans about - traffic, the state of the roads, the air in winter. But the one that gets me most is civic sense, or the lack of it. People will keep their own flat spotless and throw the wrapper straight out the car window. We queue perfectly at an airport abroad and turn into a mob at a station back home. Same people, different switch.
So I’m curious what others who’ve left think:
• What hits you hardest when you come back now - good or bad?
• Is the civic sense thing actually getting worse, or did living elsewhere just make me notice it?
• If you could fix ONE thing about how Mumbai runs day to day, what would it be?
• And the honest one: is it fair for us who left to have opinions on this at all, or do you lose that right when you stop dealing with it every day?
Not trying to do the insufferable “abroad is better” thing, London has its own mess. I just think the people who’ve seen the city from outside sometimes see it more clearly, and sometimes completely wrong. Curious which one I am.
had a mate visit from outside london this week and watching their face react to stuff i’ve completely stopped noticing was genuinely unsettling. paying £7 for a pint without flinching. standing on a packed tube with a stranger’s elbow in my ribs and just… accepting it as a normal tuesday. walking past three different “everything must go closing down sale” shops that have been closing down for four years.
they kept going “and you’re FINE with this?” and the honest answer is yeah, i clocked out emotionally on most of it years ago.
so i want to know where everyone else’s line is. what’s the thing you’ve normalised that you know, deep down, is completely unhinged but you’d defend it to the death if someone who doesn’t live here tried to point it out?
I’ll start with mine: I get genuinely irritated when my building lift is out and I have to climb to the 11th floor. I know that’s a luxury problem. I complain anyway.
But I don’t want this to just be a thread of people moaning about their AC. If your daily annoyances aren’t the lift-out-of-order kind, tell us the real ones, the commute that eats three hours, the landlord, the water timings, the stuff that actually wears you down. Both halves of this city deserve a say.
This happened today and I’m still not over it.
30 degrees. A temperature this country has no business reaching and no infrastructure to cope with. I’m on the Northern line, which on a good day smells like a cheese toastie left in a gym bag, holding the pole like my life and dignity depend on it. They did. I lost both.
The driver hits the emergency brake with the warning and grace of a man who has personally wronged me. No announcement, no “mind the sudden stop,” nothing. I detach from the pole and begin my journey downward, and the only thing between me and the floor is a seated stranger’s head.
Reader, my armpit found him. Bare. Fully slow-roasted in heatwave conditions. The top of this poor man’s head took the full force of a body part that, in this weather, legally qualifies as a biohazard.
We made one second of horrified eye contact and entered a silent, binding agreement to never speak of it. I muttered “sorry” at the floor and stared at an advert for a vitamin app until I could exit my own body. He has told someone he loves about this. I know he has.
TL;DR: lost my grip on the Northern line and broke my fall, armpit-first, on an innocent commuter’s head during a heatwave.
Emergency brake on the Northern line today, no warning, and I lost my grip on the pole. Went down. Broke my fall on a complete stranger’s head with my bare armpit. In this heat. We made brief, horrified eye contact, agreed without words that it never happened, and rode the rest in total silence. He will never know my name. I will never recover. How’s everyone else’s commute in this weather?
To the person on the Northern line whose scalp broke my fall during that completely unannounced emergency brake: I am so sorry. I had a pole. I lost the pole. Physics took over. My underarm, fully marinated in 30-degree heat, btw - made contact with the top of your head and we both just had to live with that.
I said nothing. You said nothing. We have agreed never to speak of it. But I will be carrying this to my grave.
Anyway how is everyone else’s heatwave commute going?