I Hate This Place

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." (Samuel Johnson, September 20, 1777)

I loathe this quote.

Now, far be it from me to contradict such a great literary mind as Dr Johnson, but what was true in 1777 can hardly be said to hold true in 2004. Yet it is very hard to go a week in the capital without hearing or reading a truncated version of Dr. Johnson’s words.

I have a different quote. It reads:

“No Sir, when a man is tired of London, it means he’s been there about 10 minutes.”

London is a beast. It squats on the landscape, weighing down the whole country and tilting it improbably towards the South East, and belching and shitting its foul waste all over the countryside. And every year, this waste seeps out from London’s putrid underbelly and absorbs more of the surrounding area. It’s a disease; a boil on the landscape; a foul, throbbing spot fit to burst, waiting for someone to prick it.

I loathe so many things about London. I loathe the fact that 75% of people think they’re the coolest and hardest people in the world. I loathe these people, who swan about and talk about “doing lunch some day”. These people are miniature versions of London itself – a hideously glossy façade hiding a rotting filthy soulless mass underneath. I loathe the people who try to pick fights in pubs because you don’t have a Cockney accent, yet will switch to being impossibly nice if you are a local. I loathe the fact that all these people, yuppies and chavs alike, look about as healthy as the chickens that Burger King mashes into nuggets. The pallid, wan faces, with colour bleached from them, except where they’ve applied ten tonnes of make-up to counteract the effects of London.

I loathe the stench – that fetid sewer / old burger smell that hangs around most of the centre, like the smell the morning after a party where most of the people attending took improbable quantities of drugs and food, and then revisited it all during the course of the night. I loathe the filth – the vomit slicks that strew the pavement, the ten-week old glob of chewing gum that applies itself without remorse to the soul of your shoe, and which only industrial strength chemicals can remove.

I have lived in London for two and a half years now. This is approximately two and a half years too long. I was exhausted within a week of getting here and have remained so ever since. I long to get away, to escape to somewhere approaching normality, but I can’t because it has been decreed that the only decent jobs are in London. But it doesn’t matter anyway. London is like the major accountancy firms at Graduate Recruitment Time – it hoovers people up, puts them through the most impossible stresses and strains imaginable, and then spits the ones who crumble out beside the wayside without a care for them, while it continues to devour new victims.

So the next time I hear someone say that “when someone is tired of London, they are tired of life”, I am going to find this person and insert Nelson’s Column into their rectum. That’ll teach the fucker.