It does not love you back, not in the way a small town might. London is indifferent. And that indifference is its gift. It allows you to be whoever you want to be. You can walk down the street in a velvet cape, speaking Klingon, and no one will blink.

You cannot write about London without addressing the weather, but not as a complaint. The weather is the stage manager. The light in London is unique: soft, grey, pearlescent. It makes the red telephone boxes scream with colour. It turns the rain on a window into cinema.

There is a moment, usually just as the Tube train rattles above ground between stations, when London reveals itself. You see the jagged silhouette: the Gherkin next to a medieval church spire, the Shard piercing low clouds like a shard of glass, and the London Eye turning its slow, mechanical blink over the grey silk of the Thames.

London is not easy. It is expensive, sprawling, and the Tube is a sweatbox in July. It will test your patience and your wallet. But it will never bore you.

Other capitals are museums. Paris is a masterpiece you admire from a distance; Rome is an open-air ruin. But Londres? Londres is a living organism. It does not preserve history; it digests it.

Londres is a chaos you fall in love with. It is ancient and newborn, frantic and serene. It is, and always will be, the eternal magnet.

This is a city of glorious, beautiful contradictions. It is simultaneously the staid home of the Beefeaters and the beating heart of the world’s most vibrant street fashion. It is the land of queuing politely and the land of the mosh pit. To walk through London is to walk through layers.