“The true identity of London is its absence, as a city it no longer exists….”
London, Patrick Keiller, 1992
You need to come to London to leave it behind.
Like those who marry a childhood sweetheart and eventually get over their idealised romantic object, you need to live in this thankless city so that you can inch away from its gravity. So that you can try, at least.
It is the cross borne by many a peripheral existence, this pull towards a centre, so often followed by disappointment. A dive under the cortex, in the hope that you might one day reach the core and realise that sense wasn't there either, that life is a succession of pointlessnesses.
But that realisation rarely happens.