I wonder, would a bus driver let you on if you just waved some blue cardboard at the Oyster reader and shouted "BEEP!"?

So it's been some time since I posted here. At least, it feels like a long time – that would be because I have now moved to a new city and started a new job, and things are still so weird that my perception of time has been doing strange things. I haven't abandoned this blog, though. Hopefully once things have got more sorted out, I'll be able to ramp the posting rate back up again. Until then, there may be some dead air on here for a while, punctuated with the odd musing. Like this one.

The city in question that I've moved to is London. It's not a place that I know a whole heap about; indeed, up until now it's been pretty much "that place you go through on the way to wherever it was you were actually going". (For those of you outside the UK – it's almost impossible to get anywhere in the south of England without going through London at some point.) That means that I've had no chance to get used to it; however, after a week of living in Enfield, I'm just beginning to get a feel for how it works. Here's some of my observations.

First, Greater London is massive. I went right into the centre of the city last Saturday, travelling only on buses (I haven't been paid yet, so I'm travelling cheap right now), and it took the best part of two hours. For the record, that's longer than it took on the train when I lived in Essex. The outer bits of the city are so large, in fact, that they don't feel like a city. Enfield feels very much like it could be Anywheresville, a generic smallish town with all that that usually entails. It's almost as if these small towns are huddling together for warmth, creating a huge conglomerate out of completely different bits.

Bizarrely, given the first fact, central London is tiny. The bus route I was on took me right into Trafalgar Square, from where you can stand on the steps of the National Gallery and see Big Ben (or to be more accurate, the clock tower on the Palace of Westminster that houses Big Ben) and the London Eye without even moving. Walk south for a minute or so, and you can go through Admiralty Arch and find yourself at one end of the Mall, with St. James's Park stretching off to your left and Buckingham Palace staring you right in the face. Go round the edge of the park and you can walk back up Whitehall, poking your nose in at the (extremely heavily-guarded) end of Downing Street to say hello to Gordon Brown, shortly before passing nearly every major building in the political life of the United Kingdom.

You might think, therefore, that with central and Greater London being so different, there's not much tying them together. There is at least one thing, though, and that's the transport. Where most cities seem to put in a public transport network as something of an afterthought, in London it is an incredible achievement. You noticed, I assume, that it was possible for me to travel on buses all the way from Enfield to the middle of the city and back out again? That entire journey cost me £3, and it would have stayed at £3 if I had hopped on and off buses the entire day.

If I'd chosen to take the Tube instead (the oldest and most extensive underground railway network in the world, by the way) that would have cost slightly more, but not a whole lot. And, thanks to the mildly Orwellian but still rather funky Oyster cards, it would have been incredibly easy. London is one of the few places in the UK where having a car is not a convenience, but a downright liability – even outside the congestion charge zones (a good idea in principle, although I'm still uneasy about the civil liberties implications unless they have a seriously good data protection policy) it's much, much cheaper and more convenient to use public transport.

I'm still not in love with London. Walking around it, I came to the conclusion that it is a great city, in the classical sense of "great" – it really has to be, given the amount of history that's taken place here – but it's not a nice city. I don't feel as safe here as I did in Essex (although ironically I'm probably less likely to be mugged here), and I certainly don't feel as safe as I did in Oxford. It'll be a while before I'm used to it. Until then, though, you'll be able to find me, emerging mole-like from an Underground station, blinking in wonderment at the strange things around me and wondering how the hell I'm going to make it back home.