Or maybe they were just books

London has tested my virtue and found me wanting.

Pausing before the counter of a local bookstore, I weighed up the £100 in my pocket against the five books in my hands: two computing textbooks for work, an introduction to Marx, a screenwriting journal and the mathematics of everyday life. Five into one hundred, it just wouldn't go. I'd have to pick one to leave behind.

The textbooks were a given; they were the reason I came to the bookstore in the first place*. That left me to choose where my loyalty lay:

• society
• science or
• art

Am I the only one who imagines these situations have symbolic importance?

What made it all hollow, though, was the way I was (substantially) undercharged at the till — and chose not to say anything. This might sound like a bit of a non-event to many people, but it's a big thing for me.

I am betraying the values I once placed above my life.

Maybe it's just continuing the over-dramatisation, but that's the best I can do to explain it right now. I'm more noticing this as something to mull over, rather than throw myself off the Tower Bridge.

Either way, it seems that London has changed me. Or is it simply living that has changed me?

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* Even though I own copies of them already, I need at least one of them for work and shipping them from the other side of the globe is just not practical.