The last couple of weeks all I've heard is Spanish. In the centre of town, in Wood Green, in Muswell Hill, in Westbourne Grove, in Camden. Every time someone walks past me, they are speaking Spanish.

Yesterday my girlfriend and I got the bus from Muswell Hill to Angel, and sitting on the top deck of the bus were two girls who spent the journey chattering away in Spanish for 40 minutes. They looked Ecuadorian. Waiting for the bus home five hours later, some Bolivians or Peruvians wandered past, dragging suitcases. None of the Spanish-speakers seem to come from Spain - judging by accents and vocabulary, they are from Latin America - Mexico, Peru, Colombia. Ten years ago, no-one in London spoke Spanish. When I heard someone utter a Spanish word in public, I would excitedly rush up to them and start chatting away; now I don't bother.

Theoretically, as someone of Argentine extraction, who speaks Spanish, I should be pleased at all the Castellano that I hear, but I'm not. I resent it. My life is always neatly compartmentalised and Spanish felt like my secret language that I only heard and spoke when I was in Buenos Aires, visiting my dad. But the walls have come tumbling down and now I hear Spanish in London and English in Buenos Aires. I don't feel special anymore. Boo hoo. Also, all the Latinos in London speak much better Spanish than me. Damn it.

The world is so much smaller nowadays. The internet and cheap air travel mean that places that were once distant and remote are now just one more stop on the global traveller's agenda. As a teenager, no-one I knew had ever been to Argentina. Now it seems like every Gap Year traveller has been to Recoleta and Iguacu, eating Dulce de Leche and Empanadas.

I'm not quite as adventurous a traveller. At the moment I hardly seem to get out of London. I was watching one of those awful "ten best places in the UK to buy property" programmes on telly and as the smug hosts showed us around York and Cheltenham and wherever, it occurred to me that it been years since I've been anywhere English. Because London isn't really English anymore. It's a metropolitan world capital, with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails. And I like it. I like eating thai cuisine in a restaurant full of Nigerians. I like going to carnivals with Australians, listening to Japanese bands. But I do miss England sometimes. I want to see open fields and mock-tudor houses and drink tea in little tea-houses. I want something other than pressing myself into someone's armpit on The Tube. So my hope for the next few months is to get myself out of London and see if England still exists. Given that it requires a massive effort for me to even leave the flat, it's probably a bit ambitious.