A beginner's guide to London (From News Shopper)

A beginner's guide to London

4:09pm Wednesday 19th December 2007

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As a Northerner, I come to London with certain stereotypes and expectations ringing in my ears.



Everybody's uptight and miserable; Nobody ever helps each other; Life is completely horrendous and miserable and pointless and you'll wake up with a smoker's cough every morning just from the traffic fumes, whether you live in London Bridge or Chislehurst.

So I'm told anyway.

You see, on Monday morning I became the new Greenwich and Lewisham reporter for the News Shopper, having moved from the sunny (read: freezing) Yorkshire coast on Monday, where I had been a journalist for the past two years.

Before that, I had lived in Sheffield, where I trained, before that Manchester, where I studied, and before that Darlington, where I'm from.

And the universal consensus seemed to be that London was some sort of post-nuclear alien landscape that was to be avoided at all costs.

However, many of the people who expressed this opinion seemed to speak like Liam Gallagher chewing on a particularly juicy chunk of liquorice (only with slightly more drool), so I thought it was time to try it out for myself, and make my own judgements.

So here I am, larging and charging (as it were) and ready to take on the capital.

One of the most pleasing things I have noticed so far is that no matter who you are, what you do, or how old you are, you always want to sit at the front on the Docklands Light Railway.

Apparently, the child within seems to have a hold of even the most stern-looking besuited business types, driving them to the front of the rain so they can pretend to be the driver (and occasionally make little train noises - although not me. Obviously).

Living in Yorkshire was of course a very different experience to how living in London is shaping up to be.

Fortunately, it seems that people's interests aren't quite so remote.