London.

I've often heard people talk about the 'Comfort Zone'.

You know, as in:

‘A family trip to Alton Towers? Hmm… you know how Granddad doesn’t like to be out of his Comfort Zone…’

For me the term conjures visions of some fluffy alternative universe where you can come to no harm – a world where the clouds have fallen to buffer the roads in moist cotton, and the buildings are all bouncy castles minus the deadbeat dropping coins into a bumbag, and sheep lollop in ‘Z’ formations in the rosy hue of a constantly setting sun.

Actually though, the ‘Comfort Zone’ is not another dimension but an abstract concept pertaining to personal boundaries of security and confidence. And the place where I step outside of mine, it would seem, is London.

Now I love London. It fascinates and excites me in a way that it probably always fascinates and excites wide-eyed kids from Northumbrian bog lands. I reckon if you went to Piccadilly Circus right now you could probably find an earnest Northumbrian runaway trying to explain to a policemen why they have a pick axe with them, a puzzled glint in the corner of their malnourished eye as they look down and wonder how gold can be so dirty and dull in real life.

The sense of purpose and activity in the air is intoxicating in London, whereas up North it tends to only be the intoxicants that are intoxicating. But despite all of this, I still feel out of my comfort zone because I take my Northern tendencies there with me.

When someone charges rudely into my shoulder, knocking me a foot backwards before striding ignorantly onto the tube, I instinctively stutter into a series of grovelling apologies that stops only inches short of choking on my own teary snots and promising them things can be different next time.

Even when I manage to traverse the ‘Underground’ with reasonable confidence, remembering to keep to the right and pausing all but imperceptibly to consult the maps, I feel like everyone around me knows I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing – an impression rarely rectified by referring to it accidently as ‘the Metro’… (Note to self: the Newcastle Metro is a twee little chug-a-long in a rickety old yellow cart, the London Underground is a white-knuckle ride on the inside of a bullet headed for Satan’s heart. There is really no excuse for getting them mixed up.)

I feel intimidated too by the sheer size of the thing. Trying to contemplate how big London is and how long it would take to learn your way around it all is like one of those hypothetical exercises people dream up when they either need a metaphor for impossibility or they’ve taken too many magic mushrooms: ‘counting every grain of sand on a beach’, or ‘reading every book ever written’ or ‘accepting the Pope’s point about not using condoms to combat HIV in Africa’ – you just can’t do it, not unless there is something very wrong with you.

Despite these discomforting characteristics, London is where I want to take myself next in this jaunt we call our ‘youff’, and I think it’s because trying to expand your ‘comfort zone’ is a natural thing.

My Granddad may not fancy a trip to Alton Towers these days but he sailed the seven seas as a young man, his comfort zone encompassing the four corners of the globe and the humbling, treacherous blue depths that weave across the continents between them. I fancy he’s earned the right not be bothered from the greenhouse, because he took his comfort zone and spread it as far as he could while his youth allowed him.

I’ll bear that in mind when I finally get to London, and try to stop yearning for the lolloping sheep.