Tales of two capitals

There is a novel set in London called Neverwhere. The London of neverwhere is much the same as ours but different – the Angel Islington is an angel called Islington, Baron’s court is a royal court.  The effect is to make you take a second look at something that is quite familiar.  You begin to wonder just why it is the way it is and question whether you know the place at all.  I had the same experience recently when I returned to London.  For someone used to the London of “what do you want?  There you go.  Now fuck off,”  Stepping off a plane and being offered help with directions, watching people fall over themselves to assist a new visitor trying to fathom the intricacies of the ticket machine instead of huffing disapproval and being told by a railway employee a cheaper way to navigate the London transport system was a paradigm shift, this looked like London, smelt like London but sure didn’t feel like London and yet it was – it was London in post Olympic glow and hell was it a nice place to be.  This not the first time I have experienced the Olympic effect (I was in Sydney for the 2000 games where like London pre Olympic cynicism gave way to enthusiasm, good humour and general all round helpfulness) and as cynical as I am about major corporate let’s make money fests disguised as we’re a friendly and socially conscious company there was no escaping the fact that the games had brought a lot of cheer to the city.  There was the pride in putting on a good show (and avoiding any fuck ups,) welcoming people from around the world who were intent on having a good time and the joy being able to watch amazing feats of human endeavour on your doorstep.  In these times of austerity it was good to see London getting it’s monies worth from the outlay on flags and bunting being able to use them for the Royal wedding, Golden Jubilee and the Olympics. 

    

It’s not just the Olympic afterglow that’s changed the UK’s capital, London is very different to the city that I lived in for three years.  There are cosmetic differences – the city is cleaner than it used to be (thanks to an IRA ceasefire meaning we can now have public bins) and there are lots of new shiny buildings (the shard being the newest.)  The city has been gentrified – the old warehouses that 20 years ago were beginning to be developed and were as likely to house artists as city elite are now million pound apartments with fancy coffee shops and restaurants below.  Bricklane which used to be just cheap Indian restaurants, ethnic fabric and yummy Indian sweet shops as well as the cheap as chips 24 hour begel bakery has changed.  Yes there is still ridiculously affordable sub continental cuisine but now we are in a world of self conscious retro clothing stores, young designers waiting for their big break and trendy coffee shops that let’s face it can’t do coffee.  Now I don’t want to be a London (or England) basher but we need to face up to reality.  The English can boast many accomplishments – penicillin, the theory of relativity, the works of Shakespeare – but making coffee is not one of them, I’m not sure why but they just can’t do it. Over the course of my week I began to resent an addiction that lead me to pay two pound plus for a bitter hot beverage, drowned in pints of overheated yet badly frothed milk.  Coffee culture is something that’s exploded in London – you could always get a (badly made) cappuccino in Soho and the Edgeware road was the place for the super strong tar like Turkish variety but London is now packed to the gunnels with trendy coffee shops that my daggy self finds too much hard work to be in – by trendy cafes I mean the type that think it’s post modern irony to display pictures of the latest reality TV celebrity next to an artfully thumbed copy of Rimbaud.  The staff are usually well tattooed and trained to sneer at you if you order the wrong coffee before heading outside for a rollie.   

Edinburgh - check out the cloud coming in.

After a week in the sunny, friendly and not quite London London I realised that as fun as it was I couldn’t afford to be in it and headed to another of the UK’s capitals Edinburgh.  Like London Edinburgh was also full to the brim – the Edinburgh international Arts festival being in full swing.  As well as the international visitors milling around the city was full of every type of artist, writers, comedians, actors, film makers, circus performers the list goes on.  Walking down Princes Street I was asked to spare a pound by a poor dishevelled looking person, I wasn’t quite sure if he was homeless or an artist.  Edinburgh is much more a Raji kind of city (aside from the temperature) it’s small, beautiful and very atmospheric.  The people are lovely and thanks to mid century migration from Italy(I had such a head spin when a man named Gino said “what can I get for ya lassie” in the broadest of broad Scottish accents) is a place that knows how to make coffee and in contrast to where I had just left understand cafe culture comes from it evolving spontaneously rather than deciding that now it’s the alternative and cosmopolitan thing to do.  I had come to Edinburgh to catch up with S my old flatmate from Melbourne and her boyfriend H.  S and H are taking a sabbatical in the Scottish capital.  After a long overnight coach journey (I can’t afford British trains) it was a fill up for the soul to be with faces not seen in far too long a time.   Catching up on events and people from home made me very wistful for the easy conviviality of Australia and long to be with dear friends again.  S and H are both, like me, book fiends and over longs nights drinking pint cans of cheap beer we waxed lyrical over our favourite authors and books.  This was all too much for me and realising that I needed to get a bit of book time in me and spent a huge part of my time at the book festival.    

A wee dram

It’s been a while since I delved into the world of books but it’s nice to see that book audiences are the same the world over.  They’re super polite, will laugh at anything – including the lamest of jokes, during the q and a session someone will invariably stand up and start with “As a writer myself” and then proceed to ask the most irrelevant question.  As silly as it all is – I mean books by their nature are solitary endeavours to create and consume so more often than not the poor author resembles a startled bunny in the face of an audience of 100 people but it was fun to share book talk with like minded people and pick up a couple of books to see me through the next few months.

Scotland is famous for so many things – tartan, haggis, deep fried mars bars, heart disease and of course whiskey.  For my “things Scottish” indulgence it just had to be whiskey.  Sipping  a warming glass of the golden liquid in a cosy pub was the best way to warm me in the Scottish summer (I kid you not) and the best was to spend our last night together –it was just a little silly to add beer and prosecco to the occasion.  After too brief a time it was time to leave this gracious city and my dear friends.  With sore heads and promises to see each other soon it was time to say goodbye and once again make tracks.  I hope it’s not too long before I can visit the place again.

London's Burning - Welcome back

London's burning

Driving away from Stansted airport watching the plume of black smoke billowing over London and the squadron of helicopters hovering ominously overhead I wondered what circumstances drive people to such wanton disregard of others and the ugliness of pack mentality?  But I had just flown ryanair and had experienced firsthand the mob at work.  In a piece of wonderful timing, this last week I have been in England.  Two days before my arrival and the country exploded in a mass of riots and destruction that is all too depressingly familiar to anyone who, like me, grew up in 1980s Britain. 

Forgoing London I went directly back to Southampton (scene of my growing up and were it not for the accident of birth I would have no reason to visit the place) to watch events unfold on the BBC.  Having lived in London for three years while at uni (at the start of that rather embarrassing “cool Britannia” nonsense) many of the devastated places are familiar to me, I know what the streets look like and can recollect the sense of tension in the air.  I have always said to people that one of my abiding memories of my years in the capital was the feeling that at any moment things could turn nasty and like many others experienced some nasty situations while there. 

Now I’m not going to make what would be an ill informed pronouncement on the causes of the riots.  Britain has enough politicians doing that already.  Things really couldn’t have happened at a worse time, the clock had ticked to one year before the London Olympics (how the Olympic organising committee will be squirming in their seats) and most of the government were on holiday overseas – giving the impression (perhaps unfairly) that the politicians were fiddling (or in this case being told to get their own coffee by Italian waitresses) while the country burned.  When they did realise it was all going tits up they rushed back en mass and the blame game began, it was the predictable old social depravation, lack of jobs or educational opportunities to the left and blame the parents, schools, criminal underclass on the right.  Really you didn’t come all the way back to tell me that.  Watching the polies on the beeb I was struck not by the differences in what left, right and middle had to say, to be honest I stopped listening to them very quickly but the one thing they all had in common; they all seemed to have hired a serious looking suited man whose sole aim was to stand behind them and emphatically nod his head in agreement with whatever the speaker was saying, thus giving the impression that it was some sort of mind blowing genius thought that must have been sent down from above (well I say all of them but funnily enough the prime minister and deputy prime minister haven’t spent a lot of time meeting the people.)   After seeing so many of these nodders I kinda started to want one, it would be just great for your self esteem to have someone in the background agreeing with your every utterance.   

A good example of head nodding

Another head nodding experience - not sure if I believe this one as much

The press local and foreign have taken to labelling the events as the British riots which, I have to say is wholly inaccurate and insulting to the other nations of the British Isles.  The riots have been an exclusively English event with no drama in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland where, ironically plans were drawn up to ship water cannon to London if the trouble continued!  Amid all the comment and conjecture aimed more at voters than the victims it’s a pretty sad state of affairs when the most reasoned and intelligent response to events comes from Russell Brand.  London has been the focus of attention twice in recent months.  The two events highlight the vast chasm of extremes that is modern day Britain.  At one end there is the pomp and privilege of the royal wedding (how long ago does that seem?) and on the other is the wanton destruction and looting of the, for want of a better word, underclass.  Much has been written about the aspirational nature of the goods looted: sports shoes, TVs etc  for me one of the saddest sights was amid the ruins of a city high street with every shop smashed and looted one store was left intact and untouched, Waterstones.  Then again why would you read when you can watch the x factor on your new 42 inch plasma?

Having been an expat for so long and visiting the UK intermittently over the last twelve years I have watched the country change.  So great are the changes that sometimes I feel like an alien rather than a returning pome.  Many things have improved – the country has become more multicultural for example but many things remain stubbornly unaddressed or swept under the carpet.  Whether people will have the guts to admit mistakes and look to proper solutions or will they, as I suspect, go with knee jerk, ideological reactions remains to be seen.   So not the best week to be in the UK and the weather was crap.