Surviving My First Month In London

I am living in Primrose Hill, and I still sometimes have to say that twice in my head.

A month ago, I had never left America. I had moved before — Watseka to Chicago was its own kind of earthquake — but this is different. London isn’t just a new city. It’s another country, another rhythm, another set of rules I mostly learn by getting them wrong first.

The first week feels like a blur when I think back on it: old brick, wet pavements, black cabs, jet lag, suitcases, children, tea, traffic, and me trying to remember which way to look before crossing the road. I thought Chicago had trained me for city life, and in some ways it had. But London is older, tighter, quieter in some places and completely mad in others. It doesn’t unfold in straight lines. It folds around corners.

Primrose Hill is a strange and beautiful place to land. There’s a softness to it — the park, the cafés, the curved streets, the view over the city — but I never forget how lucky I am to be here. I walk up the hill when I need to clear my head, and London spreads out below like a challenge. Some days it makes me feel tiny. Most days that just makes me want to write bigger.

The family I live with has been genuinely welcoming, which has made a huge difference. The older kids are five and seven, and there’s also a twelve-month-old baby, which I only found out about after I had already said yes to the job. Classic. I thought I was signing up for school runs, meals, and mild chaos. Turns out there was a bonus level.

I didn’t grow up in the kind of family that had an au pair, so I’m learning this life from the inside. The routines, the school bags, the missing shoes, the snacks, the baby stuff, the speed at which a calm morning can turn into a live album nobody asked to record. It’s a real job, not a romantic London montage. But I don’t mind that. I’ve never been scared of work. Nana raised me better than that.

The music has slipped into the house naturally. I play guitar for the kids most nights now, and they’ve started having favourites. That still gets me. A song can feel fragile when it’s just a voice memo on my phone, but then a five-year-old asks for it again and suddenly it has passed some mysterious little test. Children don’t care about branding, genre, press angles, or whether the bridge proves artistic growth. They know if they want to hear it again.

That’s useful information. Brutal, but useful.

I’ve also been singing older songs for the family, partly because it helps them understand who I am beyond the job. I can explain Watseka, Chicago, Mila, Nana and Pop, all of it — but sometimes a song gets there faster. Playing guitar in a London kitchen after spending years trying to get heard in Chicago venues is a weird feeling. Smaller audience, bigger truth.

On my time off, I’ve been trying to see as much as I can without pretending I understand any of it yet. The family has driven me past the famous places — Westminster, Buckingham Palace, the Thames — and honestly, most of it hits me as a blur of stone, traffic, history, tourists, and weather. I’m not fluent in London yet. I’m still at the pointing-out-the-window stage.

But certain things stick.

The view from Primrose Hill. Camden being ten minutes away and feeling like someone turned the volume up on the city. Oxford Street overwhelming me almost immediately. Soho feeling like it had a pulse I wanted to follow. London Zoo with the kids, where the city suddenly became practical again: animals, snacks, toilets, tired legs. That’s something I’m learning here. London can be grand and ancient and cinematic, but life still happens at child height.

Sunday pub lunch felt like a cultural education. I’m used to bars from Chicago — venues, gigs, loud rooms, the smell of beer and cables — but pubs are different. Families, dogs, roast dinners, old men, football, children, gravy. Also, drinking is legal here at eighteen, which changes the atmosphere completely. In Chicago, being around alcohol before twenty-one always had some edge of rule-breaking to it, even if everyone knew how things worked. Here, having a drink in a pub is just part of adult life. Less rebellion, more ritual.

I like that. I’m still careful, because I know myself, but I like it.

I miss home, but I’m not falling apart over it. Missing people is just part of moving. I miss Mila in quick flashes — wanting to send her a photo, wanting her commentary on someone’s outfit, wanting the kind of conversation where I don’t have to explain the footnotes. I miss Chicago’s bluntness, the Blue Line, late coffee, friends who already knew which version of me they were getting. I miss Nana and Pop too, especially when I cook something and hear Nana’s voice in my head correcting me from another continent.

But I know why I came here.

That’s the important part.

This first month has been hard, but it’s also made me sharper. I’m noticing everything because I have to. The way people move on the Tube. The way Londoners leave more silence in a conversation. The way class, history, money, art, immigration, humour, and exhaustion all sit on top of each other here. The way the whole world seems to change trains at once.

I’ve been writing a lot. Not always finished songs yet — more fragments, titles, images, lines that feel like they’re waiting for music. London is giving me material faster than I can process it. That can be overwhelming, but it’s also exactly what I wanted. I didn’t move countries just to have a new backdrop. I came because I wanted to find out what would happen to my writing if I put myself somewhere I couldn’t move through on autopilot.

So far, the answer is: I’m tired, I’m learning, and I’m not backing out.

Surviving my first month in London doesn’t feel like a victory parade. It feels quieter than that. It feels like walking up Primrose Hill, looking out over a city I don’t understand yet, and realising I still want the whole thing.

The work, the songs, the city, the risk.

All of it.

Anni x