Originally Published: 30 September 2016
London London London. A hulking grey seething mass of out of time buildings, winding streets and tightly clipped accents. Of fast paced walking and faster conversations muttered into a telephone. For the average young British person London lives in the psyche, it is forever there just in the back of your mind, beckoning you, letting you know that no matter how hard you try, chances are you will end up living there at one point or another, slaving away under it’s great whip comprised of high-speed broadband cables and intern’s tears.
I’ve only lived here for three months now, but already I’m starting to feel like I’m getting a feel for the place. They say every city has a particular mass atmosphere to it, and London is certainly no exception. It’s hard to put a finger on it though, whereas Rome had a definite pulse, a direction you could feel it pulling, a single attitude at odds only with tourists, London is far harder to classify. It’s this wonderful coming together, no that’s too soft, this wonderful smashing together of cultures, ideals, attitudes and personas that collide to create a great conflagration of tendencies, bright enough to rival that of the 1666 blaze that aided in sculpting the city so thoroughly.
Don’t get me wrong, the city itself is grey. The buildings are grey, the roads are grey, the sky is grey, even the faces are grey, regardless of skin colour, you look at a Londoner and they just look grey. It’s not the same as the buzzing, eclectic multi-coloured Mediterranean buildings, streets and people, who wear their hearts on their sleeves and their emotions painted luxuriously over their walls. London reflects the heart of the British; our grey, uniform exterior with slightly wonky teeth, expertly hides what’s going on beneath with a stiff smile and an awkward ‘how do you do?’, but you can feel that there is something else there boiling just out of view. It’s that bubbling below that gives London its fire; it’s the bubbling magma just below the subtle crust of good manners that only needs the slightest push to crack through and come spilling out, hot and glowing into the night.
Every week at about 5:30 pm on a Friday you can sense the city give itself a great heave, as the squat, grey hulks of office buildings begin to disgorge their metric tonnes of humanity from the confines of cubicle life out onto the streets, and almost directly into the closest possible pub. The grey curtain is slowly peeled back as hour upon hour simple office drones with grey suits and grey faces begin to get a little colour in their cheeks, clinking of glasses in salutation replaces the clacking of keyboards in desperation and genuine grins spread out of those once stiff upper lips. In broader and broader strokes colour is painted over the city in a definition as yet unrivalled by any 4K television. It rises to blinding levels as the various entertainments of the weekend begin to enter full swing, quirky markets, elaborate stage shows, bizarrely decorated bars and a kaleidoscopic myriad of other activities that the mind can only begin to invent are handed the baton from the drudgery of the working week.
Cynical people will say that all this, this polar change in the city, is achieved through the levelling powers of alcohol. In fact I actually wrote exactly that in the first draft of this, however I don’t feel that it does the city or it’s people justice. The change doesn’t come because of the booze, booze is merely a product of (and I will concede also perhaps a lubricator of) what is one of Britain’s most ingrained philosophies alongside ‘tea is an answer to most issues in life’ and ‘always pass the port to the left’, one that is taught to us since we were babes suckling at the nurturing milk of Saturday morning television, and perhaps even genetically ingrained to some extent, and that is the ethos of ‘work hard, play hard’. Because that’s effectively how London runs, and that’s why you see the grey faces, it’s not because of a lack of colour in the person, it’s because they’ve put that colour away in a safe place whilst working, lest it get in the way of weekly reports and routine data entry. It’s bottled up safely whilst the cubicle walls encroach ominously on all sides, and the rat race runs all around, throwing ethanol spirit over the richly coloured canvas of the weekend. It’s kept secret as managers berate, interns collapse and tall dark financial leaders push ever skyward, until finally it can be unleashed in a great wave washing clean and clear and bright upon the institutions designed with strong enough foundations to withstand it.
There’s no distinct ending to this entry as in fact this is only really a beginning of my time here, my face has yet to achieve its proper tinge of grey and I’ve still got too much of Rome in me to learn how to really go full London on London. Perhaps I’ve romanticised things a little, but then can you blame me? After years skirting its shores, living my youth in various sleepy villages and quiet market towns, moving to Rome with it’s perpetual colour and gentle tempo, London has always been there, niggling away at the back of my mind and now I’ve finally taken that plunge. And it is quite a plunge.