Farewell, Munich

Munich rocks. Well, actually, it doesn't rock... it's a little bit too Catholic for all that although I've been assured that the Oktoberfest can be a spectacle of wholly unchaste behaviour. I'm going to miss my clever, jovial and kind new friends.

One of the best thing about Munich, though, is how much it's rejuvenated my love for London. I could barely wait to rejoin my seven and half million neighbours. Nowadays, that seems to be rather a nice number of people to have around you.

The first thing that struck me as I stepped onto the Paddington concourse was the youthfulness... an ironic observation considering how old and crusty London is in almost every detail except the inhabitants and the odd skyscraper.

I'm more portrait than Dorian myself, and my choice of 'fashion' extends to those things that I can squeeze past my thighs and multiple chins, but somehow the mod-punks, the grunge-goths, even the posh posers and the conspicuously casual elicit warm feelings of affiliation.

I've been reading Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and it has the disquieting but entertaining effect of redressing everyone as a packet of replicating genes - a complex of behaviours engineered for the purpose of duplicating it's chromosomal components.

In a city so big, it's as if we are little genes, influencing a larger organism, endowing it, individually, with attributes more complex than eye colour... with agendas instead of phenotypes. We compete and co-operate, merge and multiply, asserting our individual wills by forming communities.