Ben Machell: Why you shouldn't take London for granted

London is not a city that encourages sentimentality. I don’t mean this in a bad way — we aren’t a city of nearly nine million cold, unfeeling monsters — it’s just that it’s such a vibrant, teeming place in such a state of perpetual forward motion that you never really spend a massive amount of time quietly reflecting on, well… anything. Certainly not on your warm feelings towards the metropolis you call home.

There just isn’t the time.

There are buses to catch, groups of dawdling tourists to overtake, friends to see and a little gap that’s just opened up at the bar if you can only get there quickly enough. There are letting agents to harass and jobs to secretly apply for and family members visiting from out of town, who are absolutely determined to visit this restaurant they’ve read about even though they don’t seem to realise just how far away it is from where you live. There is stuff to do. Always stuff to do. To live in London is, by definition, to be wrapped up in it. Come on. Look around you. How could you not be?

But then awful things start happening. Benign place names suddenly take on tragic double meanings. Westminster. Borough. Grenfell Tower. Finsbury Park. Your stomach sinks every time the breaking news alert on your phone chimes at night. Do you wake the person next to you? Or do you let them sleep and hope that, by the morning, things won’t be as bad as the early reports say? But then you quickly learn that things are always worse than the early reports say. So you both stay awake, trying to make sense of events that, for the most part, are really not supposed to make sense.

You think about the dead and feel any number of things: sorrow, helplessness, anger. You think about London, and about how it’s back to doing its historical job of sucking up the very worst of adversity. And even though you’re safe in bed, and even though you know these horrors are not really about you, you still can’t help feeling at least tangentially involved on the grounds that this keeps happening in your city. And then, before you know it, you’re doing the thing you never normally have time to do: quietly reflecting on all the things you love about London, slowly unpicking the tangled web of memories and places and people that amount to your life here.

And what do you find? Well, clearly, it’s personal. There are at least 8.8 million versions of London — but some things about this city are universal. It is, for example, impossible to live here without having your horizons thrown wide open. I’ve been exposed to more people from more places than I can remember.

Even something as mundane as playing football in London has served up an international cast of thousands. So there was Edi and Besim, the bickering Albanian builders. A whole team of Bangladeshis, all waiters and chefs down Brick Lane who could run all day and tackle with karate kicks. I have, at different times, hugged, kicked and had shouting matches with Abdou, the skinny Moroccan park keeper, Solly, the huge Malian baker, assorted Germans, Czechs, Italians, Greeks, Egyptians, Swedes, Brazilians, French, Japanese, you name it.

I’ve made the mistake of drinking with Polish women at house parties, I’ve lived with boys from Dublin and girls from New Jersey. I have somehow acquired a Spanish mother-in-law. My dad, Yorkshire born and bred, now gets the hump if we don’t have Turkish food when he comes down. My two-year-old son hero-worships a handsome Kurdish greengrocer. London has brought half the world, stuck it right under my nose and I cannot thank it enough.