At Waterloo station, under the Portland stone and bronze Victory Arch, the Roman goddesses flank Britannia, holding her liberty torch aloft. London in July: skies grey, streets flecked with rain. Summer, apparently.

Suddenly, in my mind, I hear the driving electric, bass and acoustic guitars. The hairs on my arms stand up. Terry meets Julie / Waterloo station / Every Friday night. Ray Davies wrote Waterloo Sunset and the Kinks released the single in 1967, the year I was born.

Is it possible to feel a past you never experienced? Even on an everyday Monday afternoon in 2024? I was never part of Cool Britannia, a phrase also coined then, for I entered the world via Melbourne, and live in Sydney. But London is eerily familiar in its joyful sorrow: the voyeuristic narrator in Waterloo Sunset is too lazy to leave his room, wondering why dirty old River Thames must keep rolling.

I come to this city for culture, for theatre, for worlds within worlds, within walking distance. I turn amid the grey and see a parked double-decker red bus advertising ABBA Voyage, the Swedish foursome digitally recreated here for an ongoing concert, looking as if the 1970s and disco never died.

I fell in love with ABBA’s bright harmonies, melodic hooks and melancholic undercurrents at age seven. Burgeoning gay boys with something to hide often do. The first time I danced here to the foursome’s digital avatars, in 2022, Mum was still alive, but in a Melbourne nursing home, a necessity borne of cognitive decline and worsening lifelong mental frailty.

Now she is gone. When she was alive, I praised her paintings of Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, always copied from clipped photographs, nodding dishonest approval even when she inexplicably added glitter. Mum never made it to London.

I check in to the Stage Door pub in Waterloo, near the Old Vic Theatre. In an expensive city, it is a solid, cheaper option at $140 a night. I share a bathroom with a fellow human. The first time I was here two years ago, a charming London mouse scuttled across the shared kitchen floor.

The stocky innkeeper appears one morning on the floor below, chest bare, towel wrapped around him. “Sorry about the noise last night,” he says, smiling. “England was playing.” Hours earlier, the 2-1 defeat of the Netherlands to reach the Euro 2024 final basted the capital in beer and boorishness.

Going to the theatre in the West End can be expensive, of course. The 10th Doctor Who, David Tennant, who once featured as Shakespeare’s Hamlet on a British postage stamp, recently said tickets can fetch “ludicrous amounts of money”, warning of shutting out younger audiences. Top price West End tickets can fetch up to $570.