Stress City

My friend the Ayatollah (who lives on Romney Marsh) avoids London at all costs. The reasons he gives are so numerous and so eloquently phrased that their diatribic qualities would shoot this fogeyist blog clean out of the water.

I seem to have spent so much of my life in and around London that I have always tended to like the place, even though there may be warts a-plenty. But after a period of living in the countryside my return to London this sunny September Saturday (a detour on the way back from France to get a long overdue haircut and to sneak a couple of hours watching the Australia-Pakistan one-day match at Lords) left me feeling less certain about Londoners.

It had nothing to do with the cricket (Lords is wonderful on days like these), nor the Sister-in-Law who gave me a pleasant cup of tea in her SW1 flat, nor even the bad-mannered Saturday afternoon driving that is such a feature of our capital city. It was the sullenness of the inhabitants, the sheer unhappiness of the faces in the street and even the glum-looking pleasure-seekers in Hyde Park on an otherwise glorious day that cast a shadow over my day.

Driving out on the A3 I felt a sense of release at escaping London. A minor spat with a fellow motorist at Tolworth made me wonder if my unease with Londoners was a manifestation of fogeyist road-rage and that I was simply upset with the less-than-perfect driving (and pedestrian manners)of my fellow citizens. But then drivers and pedestrians in many
parts of the world are prone to unexpected outbursts - New York and Maltese cab-drivers come to mind, the tram/truck/car/bike battles in the streets of Amsterdam, and French urban driving are all synonymous with passionate and heated exchanges. But in these places the participants are behaving normally and smiling/grinning/laughing within minutes of whatever incident sparked their fury.

Maybe the traffic problems, the awfulness of the public transport system on occasion, homelessness, hunger, crime, unemployment, work problems and so forth are taking their toll.
But if London is to succeed in an Olympic bid, it must learn to smile again. Londoners must re-train in skills such as courtesy, helpfulness and above all happiness.

The day after writing this I met (at Lords) my friend Mr H who has lived in North London forever and who is a great evangelist for London. On his way to the cricket ground he had leant out of his car window (his girlfriend was driving) and shouted "Oiks!" at three West Indian youths who were ostentatiously chucking litter from their car window onto the road. Their response was to turn their car and follow Mr H for the next six miles until his car drew up at Lords beside a group of police and security guards. Unsettling to say the least. But that's the new London for you.