With the Denouement

Unlike some commercially-minded, SEO-skewed blogs, the whole point of this log has been to provide a finite, discrete record of my time in London. I moved down for 6 months and that period is now up: I’ve wrapped up my bindle and thumbed a ride back to the countryside.

Mine may have been a quicker turnaround than most, but my experience will have been largely similar to the majority of transients who pass in and out of the city. I came, I used the abundant resources, got a little overwhelmed by the masses, got used to the masses, and then left.

It’s a familiar and well-trodden cycle. In fact, most of the people I met in my time there were not originally from London. Perhaps it’s the circles I was mixing in – people who are studying and living in shared rented accomodation tend to be living an itinerant life – but it’s mostly because it’s a global city with lots of work and opportunity.

I’ll miss the convenience and energy of the place, but I can live without the constant people. That means the throng in pedestrian hotspots, the crush for the tube and even the scuttling lone walker on a late-night street.

Outside of a public toilet or your own bedroom, you are never alone in London. If you walk for more than 5 minutes without seeing another person then you are either blind or on one of the treadmills at Fitness First that faces a wall. It’s a bit much for, y’ know, life.

Ultimately, though, London is just like the towns and villages that everyone outside the capital grows up in. Sure, it’s bigger and there’s more going on, but the people there are still just trying to build their lives in the way they think is best. They show the same TV programmes there, people talk about the same stuff, read the same newspapers and shop at the same supermarkets.

The very fact that it is so busy and fast-paced could be seen to be a major differentiating factor but humans are adaptable; it’s just becomes part of normal life. It’s fun for a while though. If you haven’t done so yet, I’d say give it a go.

With the Charity Shops as Ethnographic Barometers, yo

Whilst living here I’ve made it my business to walk as much as possible. And when I say ‘made it my business’, I mean that I’m too poor to take the bus.

However, this is no bad thing as walking makes deviations possible, and deviations in London are a pleasure. To clean up one of idiot savant Karl Pilkington’s meandering theories, getting lost can be a great adventure of discovery.

Balham High Street, early 1900s. The tram obscures Starbucks

In a city as densely populated as London there are interesting little nooks everywhere – each neighbourhood has its own world of curiosa, with independently-run shops that cleanse the consumer palate after a life of getting worn down by stodgy chain-run stores and restaurants.

Without getting lost you might never find these bazaars, and the excitement of being lost in the city is unlike the bored frustration of getting stuck on some maze-like new-build estate in the middle of Aldershot; there’s the potential of finding a cool little bistro or boutique, rather than being gang eye-raped by curtain-twitching locals who fear outsiders and only trust their hairdresser and the Daily Mail.

In my area, Balham, there are book, charity and coffee shops off the main high street that are great to stumble upon and file in your brain under ‘worth regular visits’. The best thing about them is that you don’t go to them for anything in particular, unlike when you visit HMV, H&M or Ikea. If you wanted a certain best-seller from my local ramshackle book shop, you would need to have some kind of literary divining rod to find it – the store having eschewed the Dewey Decimal System for more of an ‘IED gone off’ organisational ethos. Instead, you are taking a chance – it’s an adventure.

Charity Shops: yet to grasp fundamentals of shop-front displays

Charity shops are the best exemplar of this. No one goes into one for anything specific, as by their very nature they are a random patchwork of the surrounding population’s unwanted clutter (in fact, this makes them a rather nice litmus test for the area – you could lead me blindfolded into any charity shop in the world and I could get a fair idea of where I was just from the amount of shoulder-padded blouses in the place. In Balham, for example, there are more pairs of Armani jeans on the racks than, say, Mecca).

However, despite the randomness, you might go in looking for ‘a book’ or ‘a shirt’, before hunting through the racks and shelves for a lovely surprise. Invariably, you’ll find one and, as you pull on some moneyed banker’s ill-gotten jeans, you realise that it’s the one time the trickle-down effect of wealth actually bears any tangible fruit.

With the Marathon!

Sunday was one of the few days where London isn’t awash with people who are simply out for themselves: for work, for money, for kicks. It was the London Marathon!

I’ve always thought of the Marathon as being a lot like Tim Lovejoy: an irritating channel clogger on a weekend morning. It’s also a lot like golf: highly tedious unless you are somehow personally involved.

However, I took it upon myself to wander down there and witnessed the heartwarming spectacle of nutcases powering themselves to within an inch of death for the sake of charity. Crowds were in the thousands and lined the entire course (from what I could see) to cheer the runners on.

I watched in Parliament Square where spectators expended almost as much energy as the runners with American-style whooping and air-horns were a-tooting. The irony of competitors running past the Houses of Parliament – surely the dark-hearted epicentre of bastardly greed –  for a few grand for charity made no dent on their enthusiasm. The fact that they looked as if they’d been ten rounds with a wrecking ball may have though.

Two girls flipped an Ostrich-sized bird at all the runners by selling Krispy Kreme doughnuts track-side, particularly the ones from the British Heart Foundation.

I just like this photo

Wandering around the South Bank in the early evening it was easy to come across quite a few of the battered finishers who limped slowly through the crowd but wore proud smiles that they’d earned over 26 miles and the hundreds more in training.

A lot like any performance, it’s the preparation that people have to do to get to the race which is the real heroism – the training, the fundraising and the mental fortitude to go through with something that is likely to leave you requiring incapacity benefit for a month afterwards (this is not a joke – whilst at the Southwark News recently I chatted to a guy who couldn’t walk for a month after last year’s race despite having no discernible inury. His leg’s just said ‘You took the piss, we’re having a month off’.)

Well done everyone!

With the Erosion of Soft Standards

So far, much of this blog has focussed on the physical environment of London and how it can be walked, viewed and generally abused.

Despite all that, it’s clearly the people that make the capital what it is. With its kaleidoscopic variety of culture, history and takeaways, it manages to pull in folk from all over the world like some kind of Boris-controlled tractor beam, crunches them into a giant crucible and spews them out into a nice Londony-shape.

There are people everywhere; at every time and in almost every place. You can’t avoid them. As Anthony Giddens will tell you, we are shaped by our interaction with others, and it could be seen that by living in such a densely populated place as London, you are going to be subject to a much more intense dose of pure, concentrated human. You are going to change in double-time.

Morph: Tony Hart's high-concept metaphor for the malleability of human nature? No.

So what change does London induce? Well, if you meet the people that I tend to run into at newspapers then you will probably get slightly more cynical. News is news to these people and empathy is nowhere.

An ex-soldier is homeless. News. A politician’s kid is in trouble. News. A local school is holding a fete. News-arama. Newspaper sales are falling dramatically and the industry has as much clue of what move to make next as Nick Griffin at a Dubstep night… oh, wait.

Yep, in London it’s easy to find yourself surrounded by people who are all about the benjies 24/7. There’s nothing wrong in wanting to earn good money per se, but I have heard that it doesn’t make you happy. Although you never hear poor people saying that.

Despite the avarice and the cynicism, quite a lot of these people are annoyingly nice and likeable. Sure, when a story or a money-making scheme comes along they don’t waste time in getting their slice, but the rest of the time they can do nice things like buy you a pint or pick up that magazine for you that they know you like.

So the change these types can enact is confusing. For example, I now find myself sympathising with the hacks who work at places like the Daily Mail and the Sun, people I had previously assumed were satanists who dined on Murdoch-sourced baby hearts. Having met some, they aren’t, which to a bleeding-heart liberal can be a massive disappointment. Of course, they do a job which is absolutely abhorrent and probably negates the power of matey banter over last night’s football, but you still can’t help but laugh at their jokes and maybe even buy them a pint back - as much as you want to act out your pinko wet dream fantasies where you shout at them about the exploitation of Chilean maize farmers and that NO ONE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT CHERYL COLE.

Bet this motherfucker's shorthand is immaculate

Hence, the experience becomes a balancing out where, like most things in life, you realise that the reality is nowhere near as good or as bad as you had been led to believe.

Subsequently, you naturally reassess your own standards in line with what you’ve seen. If it isn’t palpably detestable you probably move towards it, just a little. It’s not a total surrender, just a wee concession.

And inch by inch you are moving towards the city’s collective psyche, the middle-ground, to Westminster and to Mayfair.

Over the years the city will get you. When you leave people will seem to be speaking a different language, their movements will be alien and bizarre and you will be confused when toothy, provincial pub landlords explain that they don’t sell cinnamon lattes.

With the City Heat (sans Clint)

Last week brought the first hot sunshine (as opposed to autumnal chilly sun) of the year. 

The experience of summer in the city is markedly different from that in the countryside, for obvious reasons. In many ways, summertime in the country is when it really comes into its own. You can walk, lie in fields, go on bike rides and generally be gay: it’s the quintessential image we have of rolling fields and beaming glorious sunshine. There’s a reason Winston Smith went into the country to get it awwwwwnnnn. 

Conversely, winter-time in the country can have a deathly and oppressive air to it. The trees are barren, the insects are dying and everything curls up into a seasonal hiatus waiting for spring. 

Nice, but still not as good as the real thing

The city, on the other hand, is able to flourish in the winter because there is so much to do, both indoor and out. So, if the park is getting short shrift the galleries, cinemas and theatres aren’t. Nor are the shopping centres.

 

Last week the offensively mild climate gave way to real sunshine and beating the pavement produced that first feeling of real, deep-down heat – not just a bit of sweaty dampness here and there but so that the soles of your feet are steaming like a cow pat.

 

Heat in the built-up, concrete city creates a smell of fumes and people that gets into your clothes and reminds you of crowds when you get home and catch a whiff. The buses and, especially, the Tube, become travelling hot-boxes where people waft newspapers and remove layers – whilst there is always one nutcase who looks ready to scale Everest: coat, scarf, gloves, ski goggles, oxygen tank.

Dog homes, power stations and bridges

In honour of the sun I took advantage of some of London’s myriad open spaces, taking in Battersea, Hyde and Green parks in the space of Saturday afternoon.

 

These places are well used when it’s sunny. Drinkers, sun-bathers, footballers, power-walkers, drinkers, joggers and drinkers all decide they’ve spent far too much time shopping during the rest of the year, leave all their purchases at home and wear very little on the grass.

 

Here are the parks so far (I’ll try to visit them all before leaving):

 

Battersea

 

People on tandems, walking dogs and even one guy trotting around with a parrot on his shoulder. Unlike most of the other parks, it’s not just a big field, there’s a lake which you can pedalo and row on, a huge pagoda overlooking the Thames and a massive variety of gardens.

 

Hyde

 

One of the aforementioned big field parks. But not David Cameron’s Big Society big; actually big. It’s a behemoth, but none too interesting if you are already familiar with grass and a view of tower blocks and not a lot else. Look out for twats playing really organised games of rounders that look like no fun at all.

 

Green

 

Not the biggest but in prime location between Piccadilly and the Mall meaning that you have a nice little leafy walk between shopping and sightseeing. Basically the Queen’s front garden so never going to go to pot either.

With the Colour and Context

As Simon Kuper relates so well here, the books and music that denizens of the Communist-bloc era consume now will never resonate quite so much as they did then. A few errant tentacles of MTV-pop reaching over the Wall or a bootleg copy of a John Hughes film weren’t just pleasant distractions, they were a strident reminder of a world going on without them.

The end of history was inevitable. Nobody wants to be the guy outside the party looking in, it’s not in our nature. And that was the key stumbling block for Communism, they could see the shiny success of Capitalism.

Any excuse for this photo

As a kid, I grew up in what I now see as a dull, grey, dead-end town – not quite East Berlin, but it had ennui fo dayz. At the time, I loved it. It was safe, with lots of places to play away from adult eyes, there were no ‘scenes’ and minimal peer pressure. I never really endured a terrible period there and in the end I left out of necessity and boredom.

I enjoyed the town for all the above reasons, but also because – unlike the East Berliners - I didn’t know any better. Trips to bigger and brighter places were rare, and I certainly never came anywhere as exciting as London. If I had, my experience of the town might have been a little different.

Now, in the fifth paragraph, to the point. Would growing up in a big city be too much? Would a city kid be doomed to a life of disappointment in other places? How can provincial towns compete with Hamley’s or London Zoo? Even trips on the Tube must be an exhilarating adventure for a child.

It’s not a question I can really answer here, but I’m sure it’s all relative. I’m not certain metro-nippers get the same rush when they hit the countryside as I did the first time I went down Oxford Street, but maybe a gentle calm sweeps over them or something like that (Londoners seem fascinated with nature – it still surprises me that a squirrel in the city can draw a crowd attentively staring in hushed awe – we get the cheeky bastards in our garden everyday at home).

VERMIN

So maybe they’ll only ever have interest in the city, which is a shame, because perhaps they won’t appreciate it in the same way. When I’m back in my home town – admiring the homogenised flat-pack town centre that defiantly retains the grey anti-sheen that it’s always had – it’s easy for me to wonder how I was ever happy there.

But I was, because it was my universe. Perhaps when you’re older and you move around your universe becomes different things – people you love or your vocation. If you’re lucky you get both.

When you’re a kid you shouldn’t have more than you need, and all I needed is a bike and a football. Loving parents help too of course, and I had those, but they pale in significance to a Raleigh Grifter with the sweet foam padding on the handlebars.

With the Borough Market

This post is number 1 in a series of 423 where I observe places in London where I can’t afford anything on sale. 

I learnt over the weekend that food has many levels. Whilst I, like most people, buy pre-plucked, pre-packed and pre-cooked wares from the local supermarket, there are millions in the world who dream of being able to buy Smash or Super Noodles. 

There are also those who wouldn’t dare step foot in Lidl for fear of catching poor and metamorphosising into a chav replete with cheap jewellery, a Croydon facelift and genuine struggle in their life. 

These are the people who shop at Borough Market, a foodies’ heaven with a literal cornucopia to select from. And, although I’m proudly liberal with a penchant for redistribution of wealth and equality, it’s hard not to be seduced by the white middle class utopia of a bloke giving you free cheese. It was very nice. 

The decadence of cheese

 

Walking into the market pitches you right into a stramash of tastes and smells while savvy tourists, wealthy shoppers and foreigners (no doubt relieved at being able to find a place to buy decent olive oil and cured meats) mill around nibbling on the various samples. 

You could quite comfortably have a full lunch from the freebies on offer, and that’s before you actually succumb to spending your hard-earned on a lamb, rocket and chilli flatbread, baguette or wrap and go all Lloyd Grossman (I heard one irony-free chap proclaim “that is just marvellous” upon taking a bite out of his miniature mozzarella taster-cone ). 

Colonel Sanders: 4 Purple Hearts from Gettysburg

 

Just a few steps away, parallel with the market and the Thames, a back street is lined with gleaming London chain eateries. They have the same names as the replicas you know and love – Wagamamas, Nando’s, Starbuck’s, Nero’s – but are cleaner, newer and with trendier staff with a-line symmetrical dodecahedron haircuts. 

They are packed out, people spilling out on to the streets in order to get the coffee, bran muffins and have-a-nice-day-patter that they can get anywhere in the country/world. Meanwhile, pubs sell ‘traditional’ fish and chips for £9 a pop to sore-footed tourists. 

Maybe it’s the inner-ponce in me talking, but I think I would rather they were getting ripped off by the passionate independent market traders round the corner than by the bureaucratic conveyor-beltists with painted on grins.

With the Meetings

Fallow for three weeks, but there are reasons! The main one being London.

In a large city - with all the conveniences and amenities that brings – doing certain things is a lot quicker than elsewhere. Travelling on pre-designated linear routes, popping to the shops or getting mugged to name but three.

However, some things take much longer. Mainly driving and getting things done. The latter is down to there being so much to bloody do here: every time you think you have a plan, something else interesting comes along and guns it down with extreme prejudice.

Pre-Han Ford: untouched and bespectacled...

Despite my ambitions of becoming a football journalist (I want to write about the game, not become a schmoozing parasite) my networking skills aren’t particularly great. Or at least that’s what I thought until I found out that networking just means talking to people and being nice. That, I can do.

Consequently, my plans of a complication-free life have been dashed by London’s magnetic force-field. As soon as I moved here, people wanted to ‘meet’. Unbeknownst to me, quite a lot of business goes down in this global financial centre and I found myself caught up in the periphery just a little bit.

The first thing you notice in one of these ‘meetings’ – generally taking place in a cafe, pub or restaurant – is that everyone around you is in one too. You can be pretty sure that no one takes their beloved out for a romantic date in the Square Mile for fear of being subjected to a partially-overheard second hand conversation on why the two schmohawks called Charles and Faulkner sitting next to you want to ‘re-shift the paradigm’, ‘get into the consumer’s head-space’ or ‘hover imperceptibly above the market-place using nu-technology pathways’.

My meetings include me nodding and trying to look interested and fully aware of what is being said while ambitious types try to impress me with their knowledge of certain marketplaces. Then my technique is to agree with them and ask for the hunter chicken so as to avoid having to buy my own tea that night.

I’ve done other stuff too:

• Driving  – ridiculous – Google maps’ journey duration estimations become obsolete in the face of a cocktail of traffic lights and plebs.
• Trying to book tickets for something – must book 8 months in advance, preferably before the event has even been announced. Or just go and buy from the real distributors – touts.
• Drinking – it’s rife and complacently accepted but you can’t help but do a little bit when you are here.

This weekend and next I’m going to try and do more things so I can talk about those things.

With the Place Where Nobody Knows Your Name

 

(I know I promised something other than badly thought-out sociological observations, but I’m starting to think it’s all my brain can do now. Damn you, university.)

The unique environment of anonymity afforded by the city is summed up nicely at the beginning of North By Northwest. Cary Grant hoodwinks an innocent chump into giving him his New York cab with a simple trick:

Grant (whilst easing the man aside to leap into the cab with a dame on his arm): “Excuse me, you wouldn’t mind, I’ve got a very sick woman here.”

Chump: “Well, no…”

This would be a difficult ruse to pull in a small town and near impossible in a tiny village. Not because the people there are sharp as tacks and impervious to such chicanery – but because there would be too much of a danger that you would run into that same person the next day, questions would be asked, and you’d be on the first tractor out of town.

In London, the amount of people and the pace of life means that there are plenty more opportunities to be anonymous, in a positive and negative way. It’s the reason the concept of the flaneur came about, and the same reason that the cliche ‘lonely in a city of millions’ exists. It’s an easy place to get lost in the crowd.

Despite the anonymity, people are constantly aware of being watched. For obvious reasons – we are social creatures and no one wants to make a tit of themself by tripping over or having their trousers on back to front.

Spend an afternoon sat in a cafe (a habit I never understood before moving here. That’s for another day though) and you quickly realise that London is an orgy for people-watchers. Everyone knows that voyeurism is the bee’s knees and this city is like the people-watchers annual NEC exhibition where all the best people in the world turn up and let you have a look for nothing. But everyday and with no dolly birds annoying you with leaflets.

It’s got diversity coming out the wazoo and with most people displaying a kind of aloof, carefree attitude that you don’t see in relatively self-conscious provincial towns. In those smaller places there are specific people to impress (friends, family, ex’s, enemies – in the country these personas can sometimes be found in one person) but in the city there is just a generic sense of ‘London’ watching you.

London: like a Benetton advert but uglier

However, these are just the people you see on the streets. For all the people who strut around Camden with wanton abandon and an almost aggressive amount of confidence, there must be plenty who can’t bear to go out, to face the crowds and the thousands of pairs of eyes.

With Amerigo and Ferdinand and Christopher in Streatham

They actually do. Except the ones that get all murdery

So, this was a week of discovery. As previously mentioned the public transport in London is a wonderful thing. As well as that, the sheer density of the place makes it easy to go from place to place by foot.

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that if you picked almost any point in the city and walked for 15 minutes in any direction, you would more than likely end up in somewhere with a totally different racial and social make-up. From my brief experience, this is particularly true in South London, and particularly true for me in Balham.

This week I’ve been working in Streatham on the South London Press - a 15 minute walk from my front door.  As part of the time there I was given the opportunity to travel around the area by foot and by bus and it was an eye-opening experience.

These are places that you would never see if you never went to them. Not affluent or safe enough to be the backdrop for a Richard Curtis film, not rough enough for a gritty urban drama and not leafy or suburban enough for a terrible BBC One sitcom. They are places for people to live out their lives, just on the edge of the party but never in it, and probably oblivious to it all anyway.

Despite that, a lot of the people I met there were interesting, funny and seemed to really care about their community. These sort of people are attracted to and engage with the local paper I guess, but it was nice to see that in a big city, where there are so many overwhelming factors that would make it easy to make your excuses and give up, that these people don’t.

I’m going to do something that isn’t people watching or anecdotal pseudo-sociology this weekend so hopefully I’ll have something more uplifting to talk about next time…