359 Days in the English Workforce

They say when one door closes, another opens. I just didn’t expect this door to slam in my face quite so soon. My journey into the British workforce lasted only 359 days. I didn’t even make it a full year. My final contracted day was last week, and as I left the Sage after returning my laptop and key card, I paused for a minute to look at the building that only a year ago, I was so excited to be calling my workplace. 

The Sage Gateshead

It’s a very unusual building, iconic. I think it looks like a shining, silver patchwork chrysalis for a gigantic caterpillar that’s resting along the quayside. The inside is just as marvelous. There’s no hint of a transforming butterfly–just massive, beautiful concert halls and exceptional views of the River Tyne, including the plethora of imposing yet graceful bridges that straddle the water, the nearly 900-year-old keep of Newcastle Castle, and all the amazing old buildings, spires, and clock towers that still make me marvel that I live in England. I felt a childlike excitement every time I beeped my way through the stage doors and into the front of house, always secretly expecting someone to stop me and ask what I was doing there. 

Newcastle quayside

Before we even moved to England, when Rory was just applying for the job at Newcastle University, I found the Sage after some quick googling and instantly knew that I wanted to work there. It’s not just a concert hall, but also provides a very robust community music education program. And the program I was most keen on being a part of was In Harmony. Similar to El Sistema music programs around the world, In Harmony is about transforming kids’ lives through music education. In Newcastle, it operates at two schools in the culturally diverse but lower-income West end. Every child at the school receives his or her own orchestral musical instrument as well as two to three hours a week of music instruction. All for free. It was the perfect fit for me, working with In Harmony, or so I thought.

The thing was, I knew, after fifteen years of teaching music, that I was done being a teacher. I had suspected that I needed a career change about eight years ago, but I persisted in music teaching because that’s what I had trained to do. Since I was a teenager I had wanted to teach music, and everything I did after high school prepared me to follow that path. So even though I knew, deep down, that I should find a job that aligned with my true self, where I wouldn’t have to put on an extroverted façade all day long, it felt too scary of a prospect to up and leave. That’s where In Harmony came in. 

An In Harmony program assistant job opened up last summer, and given that the program runs at my daughter’s school, and I would be working close to our neighborhood, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for me. It was a purely administrative job, not a teaching one, and it was in the music education field, so I would still feel right at home. Or, mostly anyway, because music ed in England is not the same as in America. But we’ll come to that later. I worked out of the two schools, doing mostly simple tasks like printing music and setting up chairs and music stands, and I could be as introverted as I wanted to be. There was very little stress involved, no work in the evenings, no sleepless nights agonizing over how to deal with difficult students. After two years of pandemic- and baby-induced stay-at-home momming, I was grateful to be out of the house and having conversations with adults again, even if the majority of my skills and training were not being put to use and most of my music teacher colleagues had no idea that I was actually one of them. It was a job and I was getting paid for easy work.

But this was my first foray into UK working life, and it was the first time since moving to Newcastle that I was surrounded by non-family British adults all day long. It was eye-opening. Although everyone was welcoming, more or less, I never quite got over my feeling of otherness. It was little things: having my colleagues offer me a cup of tea multiple times a day (nice, but strange), hearing different music terminology and pronunciations (see below), and not understanding 90% of the interactions I had with the school caretaker (US: janitor) due to his Geordie dialect. 

On one memorable occasion, I was talking with my boss and some of my colleagues, and I learned what I thought was a new British term. New to me, anyway. They were describing someone and feigning surprise at the person’s actions. “Shakara!” my boss said. Shakara? What the heck does that mean? I thought. Perhaps it was a word with roots in one of Britain’s former colonies, like pukka, or pundit. I pondered it the rest of the day, and when Google didn’t help elucidate things for me, I asked Rory if he was familiar with the word. He was puzzled too. But later that evening we had a breakthrough. Turns out I hadn’t learned a quaint new English word. I simply couldn’t understand my boss’s accent. It wasn’t shakara, it was shock horror. Oops.

British music terminology also required a lot of learning. It was strange to be working in the same field as I’d always been, and yet to not know the right words for things. Take rhythms for example. In the US, rhythms are described using a logical fraction system. A long, four-beat note is a whole note. A shorter two-beat note is a half note. One beat is a quarter note, and so on. In Britain, logic is nowhere in sight. Rhythm terms are random, and admittedly, rather comical. 

• Whole note = semibreve 
• Half note = minim
• Quarter note = crotchet (how do people say that with a straight face?)
• Eighth note = quaver (also the name of a cheesy crisp)
• Sixteenth note = semiquaver
• 32nd note = demisemiquaver
• 64th note = hemidemisemiquaver (you’ve got to be kidding me) 

Perhaps it seems a small thing, to have to use new terminology and to not always understand what people are saying. But it’s those little things that cement the feeling of not belonging and shatter the illusion you create for yourself that you’re at home, doing what you’ve always done. They make you realize again for the thousandth time that you’re a foreigner. You’ll never quite fit in here. That’s life in the immigrant lane, I guess.

You may be asking yourself by now, what happened to the job? Why did it end? Surely Talia couldn’t have been so incompetent at setting up chairs that she was fired? (Yes, thank you for the vote of confidence.) Well, as with most things in the arts sector, it came down to money, or a lack thereof. The Arts Council England, a government agency that provided two-thirds of In Harmony’s funding, suddenly pulled the plug this year. I guess they decided that ten years of changing kids’ lives with music was quite enough. They left us with one more year of funding as a transition year, but starting in August 2024, the Newcastle In Harmony program will be decimated. As the last one in, I was the first one to be let go. It’ll only go downhill from here.

I’ve seen first-hand the difference that In Harmony makes in the lives of the children and families who participate. It transforms communities, it brings people from wildly disparate backgrounds together in one common endeavor. It gives children with minimal hopes for the future the tools and attitudes they need to overcome the innumerable obstacles in their path.

And it’s going down the drain.

In Harmony Newcastle will still exist after 2024. At least, in some form. Maybe not in both schools, maybe not for all the children, but a shell of In Harmony will remain. Yet it will never have the same impact as it does now, which, frankly, pisses me off. All the more so because my two kids should have benefited from this program throughout their primary school years, and now that’s been snatched away from them. Through In Harmony, my daughter started learning the cello in school, twice a week, from age five. My three-year-old son is going to have musicianship classes in his nursery (US: preschool) this year, taught by an excellent, qualified music teacher. That’s freaking remarkable. How many schools do you know that provide that level of music education? I’m willing to bet the answer is none.

And given the government’s disregard for the value of arts education, I expect there soon won’t be any schools left in England embracing music on the same level as they currently do with In Harmony. For me, as someone who has dedicated my entire adult life to teaching music, this is heartbreaking. I was only with In Harmony for a year, and all I did was make copies and stack chairs, but it’s been hard to leave this program, hard to see its foundations crumbling, and hard to say goodbye to my first British job and colleagues, even if I didn’t always understand what they were saying.

But when one door closes, another door opens.

There is one upside to my newfound lack of employment. Thanks to the financial security provided by my wonderful husband, and the free preschool childcare provided by my kids’ school, I now have the time, freedom, and mental space to try full-time something I’ve always wanted to do: writing. The ultimate job for the introverted. You may be seeing more blog posts from me soon. Stay posted.

Two Years in England

I had a delightfully English experience as I washed the dishes the other night. I was rewatching the final episode of season five of Downton Abbey, where the Crawleys attend a shooting party at the fictional Brancaster Castle. I was scrubbing a frying pan and suddenly had to lean in to get a closer look at my phone, because on the screen was a decorative wall chock-full of several-hundred-year-old pistols and swords arranged in swirling patterns at the entrance to the castle. You know, just your average wall of weapons to welcome your guests to your home. As you do in England. 

Downton cast in the Alnwick Castle library

Except that this was no mere set for a TV show–I had seen this very same wall only a few hours before when we visited Alnwick Castle in Northumberland. Built in the 11th century, Alnwick (pronounced “Annick”) Castle is the second largest inhabited castle in England after Windsor Castle, where the Queen’s family lives. The Duke of Northumberland and his family live at Alnwick, and it’s very strange to see current family photos and squashy bean bag chairs around a flat-screen TV juxtaposed with the centuries-old portraits and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the library. The castle was also used as the Hogwarts castle in the first two Harry Potter films, so go back and re-watch those if you want a sense of the grandeur of the place.

Castle visitors taking a broomstick flying lesson

Back to Downton Abbey. As the Crawleys walked up the stairs from the weapons wall and into another lavishly decorated room, I recognized two black and gold cabinets that Rory had pointed out to me earlier that morning. He told me that the absurdly ornate cabinets were purchased for the castle a few hundred years before from the palace at Versailles; they were apparently considered tacky and out-of-date, which is why the French royalty were keen to sell. Naturally, an English aristocrat bought them. I would have loved to delve further into the fascinating history of the castle and its many curiosities, but our tour through the place was at a very brisk pace, owing to the need to keep toddler hands off of priceless works of art.

Little bulldozer enjoying the castle grounds

It is experiences like these that highlight one of the many charms of living in the UK. Namely, that history is at our fingertips. One need only drive a few miles before a medieval castle pops up. And closer to home, the house that we bought in December is one hundred years old, which is fairly typical here. We were amused to find that in the original deed to the house, it said we weren’t allowed to build stables in the back garden or there would be a five pound penalty, which really dashed our hopes of opening a ranch. And a little ways down the street from us is part of Hadrian’s Wall, which was built by the Romans nearly two thousand years ago. We haven’t stopped to look at it properly yet, as it’s next to a busy road near the highway. And also, it’s just a pile of rocks. Historically significant, sure, but not all that interesting. Nonetheless, living in England gives us the opportunity to engage with history, even ancient history, in a very real way that wasn’t part of my upbringing in America. 

Speaking of ancient history, it has already been more than two years since Rory and I moved our family from Hawaii to England. The anniversary of our early-pandemic 7,000 mile journey came and went without me even noticing it this year, perhaps because I’ve grown so accustomed to living here, or more likely I just forgot due to my motherhood-induced brain fog. But now that this country is coming out of the pandemic, I’m beginning to see it in a new light. We’re able to travel around more and visit fascinating places, and we’re finally getting to know our neighbors and make lasting friendships, all of which make this foreign land feel a bit more like home.

In less than a week, however, I’ll actually be going home. We’ll be making the trek back to the United States to visit my family in Washington and Oregon, most of whom I haven’t seen in three years. It will be our toddler son’s first transatlantic flight and his first time meeting his aunts, uncles, and cousins in person. And our nearly six-year-old daughter has been in England so long that she has no memory of America, so I can’t wait to see what she thinks of the place. Fingers crossed for a smooth and joyful trip back to the land of the free.

Thanksgiving in England

Thanksgiving has been billed as the end of an era in my family this year. My parents are hosting the family dinner in their Oregon home for the last time before they sell their comfortable, spacious house and downsize to a one-level place. At least, that’s what they keep telling us. Speaking from recent experience, I can confidently say that buying and selling a house takes longer than you think it will, and knowing my parents, I wouldn’t say with certainty that they’ll be out of theirs before next November. Still, that’s the plan, so my three brothers and their spouses, my six nieces and nephews, plus my two cousins and their two kids will all make the journey through the evergreen forests to converge on the warm and cozy Huntington Drive house this week with silly amounts of delicious food to share.

I won’t be there. The home I lived in from ages thirteen to eighteen will be filled with everyone in my family except me. But I’ve been to enough Lindsley family Thanksgivings that I can envision how the event will go. The dining table and card tables will be set up with elegant autumnal table cloths and centerpieces. The natural wood buffet table in the kitchen will be laden with an indecent number of pies of every variety imaginable, including a “mystery pie” designed to test the taste buds. Scents of sweet potato casserole browning in the oven, fluffy potatoes being mashed, and a huge smoked turkey sizzling away will permeate every corner of the house and make tummies rumble.

The absurdly long remodeled kitchen will be bustling with my mom in an apron and some variety of her daughters-in-law, with the occasional appearance by my brothers. My dad will be as far away from the action as he can manage, likely outside in the shop. The younger kids will be chasing each other around the downstairs, or playing music on the drums and xylophones, or playing games, while the tweens are ensconced in the squishy tan sectional that borders the family room, staring at their phones and ignoring the world around them. My siblings and cousins will be catching up with each other’s news. Despite all living on the west coast, they don’t see each other that often, and they will be sharing how jobs are going, how the kids are doing in school, and what new sewing or DIY house projects they’re tackling. It will be pleasant and comfortable, with only a light dusting of chaos, now that most of the grandkids are older and that my two rambunctious children, one and five years old, won’t be there.

My son, a toddler with a sense of humor and his own agenda, has never been to that house. Born a few months into the pandemic, and shortly after we moved from Hawaii to England, he was eleven months old before he even met my parents in person. He has never been on an airplane, has never been outside of the UK. My brothers and their families are just moving pictures on a screen to him.

In contrast, my five-year-old daughter has been on about thirty airplanes in her short life, traversing oceans and continents, and last visited my parents’ house two years ago. But Covid and time have obliterated those memories for her. Even her previous home of Hawaii is more of a feeling than a memory now--just warmth, fragrant breezes, and contentment. Oregon is a foreign concept to her, just like the holiday of Thanksgiving itself. She doesn’t remember her last Thanksgiving in Oregon as a three-year-old, drawing pictures on the kitchen chalkboard with Grandpa, who made it down onto the floor with her. Or reading If You Give a Mouse a Cookie with Grammie in the floral armchair. Trying to emulate her big cousins who were very sweet and patient with her. As etched into my memory as those events were, the relevant synapses in her brain have already been pruned and discarded. So this week I’ve been trying to explain to my daughter what Thanksgiving is about. A budding English girl, she remains unconvinced of its importance. 

“But it’s not a real holiday since I won’t get to stay home from school,” she told me yesterday. Admittedly, she has a point. Thanksgiving doesn’t feel quite the same living in England, when no one else is snug at home on a Thursday, cooking up a storm, and gathering with family to celebrate. There’s a sort of inertia that washes over you when celebrating something by yourself in another country. When the only turkeys you can find in the stores are frozen ones set out early for Christmas, and when you have to order canned pumpkin from Amazon because it doesn’t exist elsewhere. When British people look incredulous and slightly disgusted if you mention pumpkin pie. It’s tough to be an American abroad on Thanksgiving. It’s a holiday that revels in the concept of home, with comforting rituals of food and family to encourage you to reflect on the beauty and bounties of your home and family life. Yet because you have made your life in a foreign country, your whole understanding of what constitutes home has acquired so many shades of complexity that nothing and nowhere quite feels like home anymore. Try as you might to approximate those rituals, you simply can’t evoke the sentiments in the same way. Instead of togetherness, you feel more alone. 

But I wouldn’t want to abandon my family’s traditions and give up on Thanksgiving. Given that my family doesn’t celebrate Christmas together, Thanksgiving is the one holiday of the year where we acknowledge the beauty, vitality, and quirkiness of the now much-expanded Lindsley family. Where we overcome our introversion and ineptitude at polite conversation for the sake of building unity amongst our selves and our spouses and our children. It’s also where we remember our loved ones who have passed on, by sharing stories about them and keeping their traditions alive. Before my family eats their Thanksgiving meal, for instance, they will undoubtedly circle around the kitchen holding hands (or touching elbows this year, perhaps) and chant “yummmmm” in the style of my aunt Maya, whose peaceful and loving presence will be missed again this year. Thanksgiving allows us to see how beautiful the foliage is on our family tree, and the falling leaves outside remind us of those who have already floated away from our branches. 

As I thought about Thanksgiving this year, my second year in a row of not physically being with my family, I reflected on the purpose of the holiday and its place in my life. Thanksgiving isn’t just about catching up with relatives and stuffing our faces with food. And as I’m realizing more with each year I spend outside of the US, it also isn’t about relishing the coziness of my parents’ house and feeling comforted and loved by the people I grew up around. I live 4,750 miles away from my parents and siblings. If I focus on the distance between us and what I’m missing out on because of it, I’d much rather skip Thanksgiving altogether. It hurts too much. Besides, if my parents do manage to sell their house before next November, I won’t have a familiar home to go back to anyway. So I have to let go of those ephemeral desires and focus on what Thanksgiving is really about.

Thanksgiving is about gratitude. That’s what I told my daughter anyway. She quickly latched onto the concept and started listing things she was thankful for. “I’m very thanksgiving for having such a wonderful loving mum,” she said, before hugging me with a warm smile. I managed to keep a straight face at her misuse of the word “thanksgiving”, and then cringed inside just a little that she called me her mum instead of her mom. But I let the moment pass and listened to the rest of her gratitude list. It was sweet and thoughtful, a beautiful reflection of her five-year-old mind.

And reflection is needed if we are to look deep enough within ourselves to feel a genuine sense of gratitude for all of the twists and turns that life throws at us. What a marvelous and unexpected journey I’ve had that has led me to this place. From Washington, to Missouri, to Oregon, to Ohio, to Paris, to Hawaii, to England, I’ve taken with me the love of my family, my husband, and now my children wherever I go. Thanksgiving gives us the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of home and family, and when I think about the manifold blessings I’ve received, gratitude wells up within me, threatening to leak out as tears. This time of reflection, this appreciation for life’s bounties, this thankfulness for the people in our lives is what I want to pass along to my children by sharing my holiday with them.

A first Thanksgiving for my Scottish in-laws

I hope that one year we’ll make it back to Oregon in November, perhaps when my son can sit still for more than thirty seconds and can handle fifteen hours on an airplane. But in the meantime, we can still contribute to our family
unity by celebrating Thanksgiving in England. In the words of my dad, “We live in two worlds at the same time. In the one there is distance and in the other only nearness. To travel on the wings of love in this world you just have to move your thoughts to your desired destination and there you are!” I’m right there with you, Dad. 

P. S. Speaking of homes, Rory and I have just bought our first house! We get the keys tomorrow! 😄

Goodbye, Hawaii

Sunset over Waikiki.

Our blog, Turnbull Travels, has been dormant for two years. After the initial shock of moving to Hawaii wore off, and the prospect of potentially living here forever set in, I felt less need to document all the exciting quirks of life in Hawaii. Also, parenting and work took over our lives. But now our stay in Hawaii is coming to an end and a new adventure awaits us.

It has been almost three years that we’ve lived in Honolulu. While Rory has happily continued with his assistant professorship at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, I’ve had a variety of teaching jobs, ranging from being a full-time orchestra teacher at a Catholic all-boys school (I often needed those Hail Marys), to starting a violin program with the Hawaii Youth Symphony for underprivileged predominantly native-Hawaiian students. We’ve developed fulfilling relationships with friends and colleagues while making progress in our careers.

Our beautiful daughter has become an articulate and quirky blonde three-and-a-half year-old, flourishing under the warm sun and palm trees. She’s attended two preschools here and has made plenty of friends, though she still usually prefers the company of her stuffed animals and her imagination. She gets excited when it’s “cold” enough to wear a jacket. To stay connected to family, she Skypes weekly with her grandparents and likes to send them long strings of emojis on Whatsapp. By Rory’s calculations, she’s been on nearly 30 airplanes in her short life.

Hawaii has been good to us. If you have enough money, it’s easy to live here. Throw out half of your wardrobe, buy a good pair of slippers (flip flops), and you’re basically set. It is undoubtedly the most beautiful place I will ever live in. I wake up to lush green mountains every morning and they still take my breath away. We’ve also had the chance to see three of the other Hawaiian islands besides O‘ahu -- Kauaʻi, Big Island, and Molokaʻi, and all of them have their own incredibly unique landscapes and flavors. Hawaii has provided us with amazing adventures and a home that is easy to love.

View of the windward side of Oahu while hiking.

Sadly, it was hard for us to visualize ourselves living in Hawaii long-term. We’ve been fortunate to live in subsidized university faculty housing, making our two bedroom apartment reasonably affordable. But as we approached the end of our allotted time there, the prospect of buying a house began to loom large. With average home prices in our neighborhood of nearly a million dollars, we had to consider the possibility of moving out to the suburbs, where houses are only slightly less absurdly expensive, and commute times are disheartening. We also began to think about the Hawaii education system as our daughter gets closer to kindergarten. Underfunded, low-quality public schools push people towards $22,000-per-year private schools, making Honolulu the second highest metro area in the nation in terms of private school enrollment. Being hugely in debt for the next 20-30 years was not what we were looking for.

Then there’s family. Rory and I have lived far from both of our families for the last eleven years. We are the only ones among our siblings who do not live within driving distance of our parents. Though we try to visit family at least once a year, the 30 hours of travel required to get to Scotland from Hawaii makes it a difficult journey. The eight hours to my parents’ house in Oregon feels like a quick hop by comparison. So as much as we loved Hawaii, in the back of our minds, we knew that if a good job came along near one of our families, we would seriously consider it.

That opportunity waltzed in our door last September. Rory was offered a permanent position at Newcastle University in the north of England, which is only a two-hour drive from his parents in Scotland. Given his narrow linguistic specialization, there are few professorships that Rory would qualify for in a given year, and hardly any in the UK. We didn’t expect to see such an opportunity to be close to family coming around again for a long time. So we jumped.

Before the movers arrived.

And now here we are, with three days left in Hawaii, frantically trying to pack, sell, and give away our belongings. We have had seven months to plan this move, and the complexities of it have been daunting. Spreadsheets and shared Google Docs have been our lifeline. I spent months (and more than $3500) working on getting a UK visa for myself, not knowing if I would receive it in time. We were given a £5000 allowance for moving expenses from Newcastle University, which sounds like a lot, until you consider that we’re moving 7,200 miles, or almost ⅓ of the way around the earth and our stuff has to cross two oceans and a continent. For a moving company to ship even a small fraction of our household belongings, with no furniture whatsoever, was going to cost at least $5000 and take two plus months to arrive. And of course, flights from Honolulu to the UK usually cost a minimum of $1000 per person and require somewhere north of 24 hours of travel time. This will be Rory’s fourth intercontinental move and my third, so we know the ropes, but the complexity of this one has been at times overwhelming.

Loading our stuff into the moving truck.

Then you add in a global pandemic. Things that we take for granted suddenly became nail biting uncertainties. Would the UK’s borders be shut? (No.) Would we have to self-quarantine upon arrival? (Possibly.) Would our flights be cancelled? (Yes.) Would the airlines still serve food? (Not sure.) Would we be able to find a hotel that wasn’t closed? (Yes, after our first booking was cancelled.) Fortunately, our friends and neighbors have been a great help, happily lending us things and buying our belongings from us (who would have thought that we’d be eager to see masked strangers coming to our door to take away our stuff?) Everyone is stressed out right now, everyone feels overwhelmed with uncertainty, but carrying out an intercontinental move during a global pandemic? My cortisol levels are through the roof.

Still, as I keep telling myself, we’ve nearly made it. The movers came last week and packed up our shipment. After today, all of our furniture will be gone. Tonight is our last night to sleep in our house and we fly out this Thursday. Things are going more or less according to plan. But there’s one other twist in this story.

I’m five months pregnant.

A trip to London

Last week we went to London to see Soraya, a dear Baha'i friend from Columbus. She was just on her way out of the UK after studying in Oxford for a term. It's easy to forget how close London and Paris are - it's just 2 and a half hours by train from city centre to city centre. London is closer to Paris than it is to Glasgow, and Paris is closer to London than it is to Marseille!

So, it wasn't difficult to hop up to England to see Soraya. We had planned to visit the New Southgate cemetery, which is where Shoghi Effendi (the leader of the Baha'i Faith from 1921 to 1957) is buried. It's a little far from central London so I think Soraya appreciated us being able to help her with directions and navigating the tube.

A view of the resting place of Shoghi Effendi. The tulips were blooming!

After paying our respects at the cemetery, we toured around central London a little. This included a trip to Oxford Road, where we looked in shops for baby things, and Soraya practically fainted at the cost of pushchairs. ("How does anyone afford to have children?") We also got to explore the famous department store Selfridge's, which we were disappointed to discover does not actually sell fridges.

Talia outside of Selfridge's

At the risk of making an obvious statement,London is different from Paris.

Yes, I've become that person who visits somewhere and then spends the whole time comparing it to wherever they live. ("Ugh, these baguettes aren't as good as in Paris.") This can be obnoxious if the place you're visiting is a little village or in a radically different culture, but in the case of London, it feels appropriate to compare it to Paris. (Both are global cities consistently ranked in the top 5 for participation in the worldwide economy.)

So, some observations that I made, in no particular order:

• London is cleaner. Not just the streets, which have less litter and, uh, organic detritus, but even just the trains and buses seem to be less grimey.
• The London underground (locally known as the tube, although I kept calling it the métro), especially the older lines, has small tunnels, claustrophobic trains, and feels much more like a series of old mineshafts. By comparison, most of the Paris underground feels like a set of train stations that just happen to be underground.
• The architecture in London is less varied than that of Paris. I'm not sure to what extent this is due to London neighbourhoods being levelled during the blitz in WWII...
• London also feels much much bigger than Paris, and the transport system is much more confusing, although these feelings might just be due to Paris being familiar to me and London unfamiliar.
• Also, people speak English in London, and French in Paris, but I overheard a surprising amount of French in London. Apparently somewhere between 70,000 and 300,000 French people live in London, giving rise to the claim that London is France's sixth largest city.

I'm curious to know if others share my perspectives (even if you've only visited one of these places). Let me know in the comments! Part of the fun of travelling is seeing how things are different or the same from places you are used to. I'm not sure what I am "used to" now (having lived in three different countries), but comparing things can still bring fresh insights.