Eternal London haunts us still
Reflecting on my London years while moving old blogs and embracing nostalgia this week.
I’ve been pottering around cyberspace this week as I moved some old websites from one server to another. Midway through my list was a blog I started in 2010 after moving to the capital, which I called “Lessons Learned in London”.
It was mainly concerned with the perils and pitfalls of the London rental market and superficially aimed at fellow newbies navigating the seemingly-arbitrary demands of prospective landlords and letting agents. Reading back some of the entries fifteen years later, I’m struck by how small my problems seemed back then (not to mention the font size on my blog).
As you read this, I’m on my way to London for the weekend, seeing family for the run-up to Christmas. The five years I lived there are memorable for the bevy of new experiences I was exposed to, and I have no regrets: I moved there at 23 and left not long before turning 30. A misspent youth it wasn’t, but sometimes I find myself starting to calculate how much money I earned during the period without saving a single penny of it, and wince.
I romanticise London because it’s a place of everything. I don’t (just) mean the all-encompassing nature of its arts, food, culture and shopping, though this is worth romanticising in its own right (there are cheeses, beers, bagels and lamb chops and I still reminisce about). It’s the enduring history and ancient magic of the place that always feels just out of reach.
I always loved the junction of Denmark Street and Charing Cross Road because of the proximity to all the famous guitar and music venues opposite the much-loved Foyles, but when I later learned that the same area was home to an infamous “rookery” (eg. a Victorian slum) I was even more fascinated by the place. I’d gawp up at the tall, dirty old houses that somehow survived there, mixed amongst the glass skyscrapers and office blocks. I wondered who lived in these places now, how you even ended up dwelling in the absolute heart of this ancient, teeming city. It felt like looking back into the past and seeing the grime and grimness of the former city looking back at you defiantly.
London’s not a place that gives you warmth: it’s anonymous, uninterested in you, selfish and cruel. People are silent on the tube because they value their limited moments of solitude while simultaneously crammed into a carriage with a thousand sweating strangers. You don’t see even your close friends very often because just crossing the city to their neck of the woods is an ordeal in itself.
You’re never more aware of being a tiny cog in a machine than when you step onto one of the old, famous streets and are carried away on the human tide of pedestrians, delivery drivers cutting past, tourists blocking the pavement while they check their phones, aloof locals walking their improbable dogs and children yelling in defiance of this place, so cold but so awesome (in every sense).
Leaving London felt like an admission of failure: I couldn’t make it work, couldn’t handle the intensity, couldn’t face the sacrifices it demanded of me. Whenever I go back now I feel a longing to embrace it once more and let myself go, resuming the argot of tube stations and bus numbers and knowing the best places for all the things you can’t get anywhere else. But I resist.
The thing I miss most, though, more than curry houses and street markets and anonymous restaurants, are those moments where the worlds of Dickens, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Gog & Magog and all the other semi-mystical stories become real once more. Just for a moment, you’ll pass a street sign or a cobbled road, a steeple or churchyard, and the cold, modern London is briefly covered with a blanket of snow, and you’re plunged backwards into the past. I’ve never felt it anywhere else, and it’s the thing I miss even now: my real lesson learned in London.
Mini-feels this week
The cold hand of… Ethel?
Last weekend, Storm Darragh blew the country apart and we were stuck indoors for most of it. A risky trip to the library with the kids saw us struggling home against the winds, trying to prevent the pushchair being blown over.
I saw an old lady hobbling up the hill ahead of us, half-crouching and beaten down by the gusts. She stopped to cross the road in an inexplicable place: sheltering behind the back of a parked car where none of the oncoming vehicles would see her. I walked back to her and offered her my hand to cross.
She gripped my arm tightly and I was struck by how cold her fingers were, uncomfortably wondering if she was warm enough at home. I raised a hand to stop the traffic and walked her to her own car. She looked at me properly for the first time and was clearly sizing me up: would I try to steal the handbag she was half-offering me? I smiled and asked if she wanted me to pop it in the back seat, and she relaxed and nearly walked into an oncoming bus as she gamely walked to the driver’s door.
I waved her off and shouted “watch out for falling trees!” as she drove away, only later regretting my choice of words.