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October 23, 2005
Sorry Virginia; You and I are going to have to differ on this one.
‘For having lived in Westminster ... one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For heaven knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it around one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.’Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
We made an unexpected trip to London for a couple of days. I always feel slightly unpatriotic knocking my own capital city, in a way that I don’t when I criticise the government or the Royal Family. It is as if , like Virginia Woolf, as a British citizen, I should find some beauty in all its grime but I’ve spent 29 years searching and never finding and finally giving up. Somehow I feel like writing this post will invite the treason police to come busting through the front door in order to accompany me on my trip to the gallows.
I loathe the place. There I said it - I loathe the place.
We usually tackle central London on foot, what other choice is there? You give your money to a miserable bus driver (and who can blame them for being so) to sit in stream after stream of traffic light systems that everyone else seems to ignore. Or you descend in an escalator down into hell , where that prickly feeling rises up your back as if you are about to burn (this would happen to me long before the bombings) and still you don’t get a seat. You have to stand, holding on to your husband because you can’t reach the bar, your nose positioned nauseatingly under some half drunk businessman’s armpit and some bitch keeps tutting because every time the train stops it launches you half way across the carriage and you end up landing on her ugly pointed shoes.
Which reminds me, heaven forbid the people who actually live there. Where else in the country can you politely say ‘excuse me’ to a group of women sprawled out over the width of the pavement and they begrudgingly, only very slightly, move out of your way, refusing point black to even look you in the eye, least of all apologise as they obviously grip the clutch of their handbags as if they suspect you of mugging them, simply because you wanted to speed your exit from the godforsaken place?
What also gets me is London’s attitude, the way it looks back on the past with rose tinted specs. It thinks it is oh-so ‘Victorian’ and another word that gets thrown about a lot is ‘Dickensian.’ Maybe I missed the point a bit but from what I’ve read Victorian London sounds almost as bad as 21st century London. Anyway was it not Dickens himself who said that the streets of London were not paved with gold but rather excrement. At least today we are being metaphorical when we say that nothing has changed.
The heartbreaking thing is that London has so much potential. Sometimes I try and treat myself to a visit to the Silver Moon bookshop (now in Foyles) but even then there is always in the back of my mind that dread that anytime soon I’m going to have to step back down tripping, staggering and dodging on that badly paved street. I love some of the stalls in Camden Market (particularly the veggie burger stall) but to get there you have to step over hundreds of teenage goths, high on poppers that they stash in their Nightmare Before Christmas bags. Yep London makes me want to kill myself too, but at least I have the maturity to not blame my poor, unsuspecting parents.
Mr PE (who grew up in London, so along with Virginia Woolf, I forgive him for his half-hearted attempts to defend the place) always says that he can walk right to the centre of Hyde Park, surrounded by the ducks and forget he is right slap bang in the middle of one of Europe’s major capital cities. I find it less easy to escape that feeling that I’m standing right on top of a multi-way junction with cars rushing all around my head with no rhyme, logic nor reason but on the rare occasion, it does happen, even to me. Sometimes I can lose myself in one of the peaceful, cool airy exhibition rooms, or drinking a strong espresso in the cafe in The British Library, (although I do wonder if this is not so much to do with the books but the fact that it is near to Kings Cross; my escape route home.) It also happened yesterday, hands pressed up against the glass, breathlessly staring deep into the eyes of one of the tigers in the zoo.
Yes. There are so many places with great potential in London but somehow they all seem to be made traumatic, dirty and hollow by their surroundings. Contrary to what those such as my husband and even Virginia Woolf would have me believe, even if you took the Fertility Goddess herself and placed her in Piccadilly Circus, by morning she would have had a tunnel built right through her womb and she would be cracked and caked in that unique sludge that I call ‘Londonness’; a mixture of smog in its borderline solid-liquid state and pigeon shit.
Posted by purple elephant at October 23, 2005 10:55 AM