Time & Perspective Quote by Julian Clary

Homesickness, Julian Clary-style, doesn’t arrive as misty nostalgia; it arrives as a craving for public transport. The line is funny because it refuses the grand, expected language of longing. Instead of “I miss my friends” or “I need culture,” he lands on the most unromantic urban emblem imaginable: a bus. It’s a perfectly Clary move, turning a potentially sincere confession into something briskly observational and faintly absurd.

The intent is twofold. On the surface, it’s a comic exaggeration about restlessness: stay anywhere too long and the itch to return to London kicks in. Underneath, it’s a sly portrait of identity tied to a city’s ambient noise. London isn’t framed as a glamorous playground; it’s a place where you can “speak to someone,” even if that someone is a stranger, a shop clerk, or the driver who doesn’t make eye contact. The bus functions as shorthand for density, movement, anonymity-with-company: the peculiar comfort of being surrounded by people without having to be intimate with them.

Context matters because Clary’s persona trades in arch understatement and a kind of dandified detachment. He suggests connection while keeping it safely mundane. “See a bus” is also a wink at how modern life can make us sentimental about infrastructure. When you’ve been away from the metropolis long enough, even the ugliest, most ordinary symbol of it starts to look like home.