Musings on The Capital #1

Unless you've experienced it personally, it's hard to comprehend how or why what is essentially an urban area of high population density can affect you personally and challenge your assumptions and views. I mean, they all have the same overpriced café chains, the same golden arches and dulling chewing gum merging into the greyish slabs.

Maybe it's the culture, the soundtrack or architecture, the memories or the company. There seems to be some sort of innate divide between those who form emotional attachments to places and those who don't. And by 'attachments' I don't mean never wanting to leave the place you've always lived, I mean having a soft spot almost to the point of melted marshmallow about places. Perhaps the people who don't go away somewhere astounding and return summarising it as “yeah, nice”. I know I could talk for hours about places that mean a lot to me, and I get wanderlust more than is probably healthy, but I don't even know if others are the same!

I used to illustrate my dislike for London whenever the topic came up (fairly often when you're around ambitious budding accountants/bankers/general high flying students) by attempting to explain the feeling that if you, for some reason, suddenly needed some sort of assistance in the smoggy and claustrophobic metropolis (if you fell over or needed help with tubes, whatever), no one would look twice.

I used to see it as being of people rushing from A to B, overweight American sightseers wearing matching anoraks, street urchins, and those who do not fulfil my novel expectations of a suitable jolly cockney ratio. The strange feeling of being surrounded by thousands of people yet lonely and small, better articulated by Henry Canby back in't day in 1926-

'What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life... and the prime cause is not vanity... but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization.'

…Scary.

But in London a few weeks ago for a fleeting visit, I'm not sure if the Nigerian single mother at the bus stop realised the pleasant surprise she caused by the variety of travel suggestions she kindly offered to us, a couple of slightly clueless northern girls with rucksacks, tents and Tesco value sleeping bags for reaching a rather vaguely described destination.

Nor am I decided if the attendant at the bustling King's Cross information desk picked up on my shock (and relief) that he was chirpy and cockney as he cracked a cocky “two sugars like I asked?” joke as I placed my large black coffee atop the surface to free my hands, looking confused. I felt immediate guilt for half mishearing so assuming he was accusingly asking me did I “push in or did you ask?” in a foreign accent.

I'm not even sure whether it's having someone to just wander round with who knows the places you'll like and who'll deal with the incessantly inquisitive questions about anything and everything that turned me into a lover of London. Even the tube.
       Ta for changing my mind.