You know that old saying ‘You never miss what you have until it’s gone’? Well I think I would put a few caveats on that rather than accept it as is. See the wife and I went up to London, and since you ask, no neither Christopher Robin or Alice were anywhere to be seen. Stands to reason, to the best of my knowledge AA Milne never wrote ‘The 747 are stacking up over the westbound A4 and Christopher Robin went down with Alice’, deathless prose though it may be.
If you have any idea of the layout of London, you would immediately surmise that we were visiting West London, in fact the non-existant county of Middlesex. I never figured that out whilst we lived there and frankly can’t be bothered now, but a county that doesn’t exist as a legal entity but has it’s borders marked on the M3/A316 has more than a little of the Marie Celeste about it. Minus the sea. And the boat. And the still-steaming mugs… OK maybe not so like it at all.
So anyway, first night as we attempted to sleep, the night was filled with a roaring sound and the air was sucked out of our bedroom! What could it be? Oh yes, there’s an airport in West London which, not content with landing a plane every 50-odd seconds, insists on doing it late into the night at that. Funny thing was, when we lived in Hampton Hill, the only time we ever remarked on being overflown was when Concorde didn’t gain sufficient height on takeoff and we got an opportunity to count the rivets on it’s underside. The tinitis didn’t recede for some time as I recall.
It just showed us what we have got used to in Lymington. When we were shown our current property we were warned by the estate agent that there was a little road noise intruding into the back garden, but once you have lived on an A road in London, a little road noise is relative. The house didn’t shake when the juggernauts went by and you could easily cross the road when there was no traffic. But the thing is we got used to it, and now we’re not used to it any more now that’s it’s gone. And we don’t miss it one jot.