I Hate This Place 5

Two things happened to me on the way to work today.

Both of them add weight to the belief I have that London turns people into automatons, zombies trapped inside their own hermetically sealed bubbles.

The first was that, while sat on the train, someone was using my head to rest their newspaper on while they read. Not in an accidental way, they just propped it there.

The second was that as I emerged from Charing Cross tube I was borne down upon by a flood of people who jostled me, knocked me out of their path, and swept by as if I wasn’t there.

The thing is, I have no doubt that any of these people did these things on purpose. I firmly believe that the person on the train didn’t realise the thing he was leaning his paper on was a person’s head (or at least he didn’t until I moved). While the tide of people who mowed me down I firmly believe didn’t register I was there. They were treading their normal path to work, the same as they do every day. They do this on autopilot, not taking anything in around them, not realising there may be obstacles.

I know this because I do it myself. First thing in the morning, I just walk the usual way, and don’t look around at things. I barely register that anything is different or in the way. This occurred to me during my journey this morning, when I found myself on the Tube, having previously got off the train. I had no recollection whatsoever of the journey from the train to the Bakerloo Line.

Partly this is the effect of mornings. Very few people are at their best first thing in the morning, and especially not when they’ve been commuting.

But it’s also London. When people say that people are more unfriendly in London than in other cities, it’s true. It’s not a myth. It’s not us outsiders bemoaning where we grew up. As mentioned previously, I grew up in Blackpool, a place I loathe with a passion you can only dream of, but you will always find people friendly and willing to share a few words, whether it be on the bus or on the train, or just in a shop. And Hell, even the people when I lived in Nice were chatty and friendly, thus blowing the myth of the French being aloof and supercilious out of the water.

Here, when I’m my usual self and just try to exchange a few words with, for example, shopkeepers, they look at me like I’m strange, or treat me brusquely in order to move me on.

This is a gross generalisation, I realise. Sandro at our work café is always ready to chat, and I happily while away a few minutes in his company. I had a good chat with the people in our local chippy last night. But the majority of people I encounter are completely sealed off from the outside world.

It links in to the last “I Hate This Place”. London has more eccentric and disturbed people than anywhere else I’ve encountered. Therefore, keeping yourself to yourself is probably advisable. People probably think I’m crazy chatting to them randomly (I probably am). But then, as I said, a lot of the eccentric people are probably lonely BECAUSE no-one speaks to them, so they speak to themselves. It’s a vicious circle.

But there’s a difference between keeping yourself to yourself, and being rude. And unfortunately the isolationist tendencies encouraged through living in London exacerbate this. People lock themselves away into their own worlds, almost like they’re surrounded by an invisible barrier to prevent people getting in. And they rarely see outside this barrier. Everyone’s in such a rush to get everywhere, you don’t have TIME to look outside that wall. You don’t realise you may have knocked someone over, you don’t realise that you’ve been using someone’s head as a newspaper stand.

Most depressing of all though, is that I can’t think of a solution to this, without necessitating a total culture change. And that’s quite tragic.