Let me tell you what's wrong with the city of London. This may take a while, so if you think you need to visit the bathroom I'd go now...
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.
The first thing wrong is that it's 200 miles from my house, and takes around five soul destroying, drizzly hours to drive there - with a jaunt through the frozen concrete hell that is Birmingham on the way.
Bearing this in mind, I'm already in a fairly negative frame of mind by the time I roll into the grubby, fly-postered outskirts of London. It's around this point at which you realise that a vast number of Londoners are crushingly, painfully good-looking in their designer clothing and expensive haircuts. All of them, though, dumb as a fucking post. All of them seemingly allergic to a simple coffee, preferring instead to drink polysyllabic monstrosities that come with a thousand variations on the theme of a hot drink. Tall, skinny, grande, half-caff, arabian mocha sanani, laden with flavors of deep port wine, berry fruit, warm earthen spices and cocoa. Just give me a fucking coffee and shut up. And you can keep your biscotti, too.
So. I've successfully negotiated the hellish roads leading into the capital and sated the caffeine monkey, and I finally feel ready to take on the city. Where to drink, though? It seems the entire city has been overrun by themed pubs - neon-drenched dungeons playing poor quality covers of classic British punk tracks sung by bolshy French lesbians. Coming from the north I only feel comfortable in a bar with a single theme: beer. A bar is a place to sit and drink until you can no longer stand. It's a place to go before buying a pizza and falling asleep in a pool of your own vomit. It's as simple as that. I don't need to be served by a fat man dressed like Buddy Holly or see a guitar briefly owned by Jimi Hendrix mounted on the wall in order to have a good time. I need only a pint of lager, and ashtray and a pack of cigarettes. Possibly a packet of crisps, if it's not too much to ask.
Such has London missed the point of bars that the first I visited served only one brand - bottled, too. Nothing on draught. Not only was I limited to one type of beer, but it was Japanese. Admittedly I don't follow the developments of the no doubt burgeoning Japanese beer market as closely as I perhaps should (at least not during football season) but I don't remember the Orient being the source of the finest that hops and yeast has to offer.
Regardless, drinking wasn't a priority for most of the clientele. Instead they chose to smoke flavoured molasses tablets from hookahs - elaborate bong-like contraptions if you've never seen one - with no narcotic or relaxing properties whatsoever. It was like smoking a cherry lozenge through a hose pipe.
On the dot of eleven, my sad little bottle was whisked away and replaced by a bill that I at first mistook for a phone number. I realised too late that I had, in ordering a chilled beverage, agreed to fund the college education of the next three generations of the landlord's family. I didn't get to finish the drink, either.
And so it was that, after quickly phoning the bank and asking for a loan, I paid for my drink and was turfed out onto the cold streets of London. Seconds later, as if by magic, I fell into a bagel shop. I say it was magic, but you could literally close your eyes and pick a direction in London that would take you within a dozen steps to the warm entrance of a bagel shop. Nowhere else on earth have a group of people so quickly and enthusiastically embraced this ethnic treat. The problem though, considering my addictive personality, is that after only two days of eating them I'm getting withdrawal symptoms. Damn the Jews. Damn all the Jews! I suppose, though, I shouldn't feel ill will toward the Jews for doing tasty things with bread (though it would be a more logical reason for hating them than most people have).
Anyway. Fortunately I had stashed a couple of beers in the fridge when I arrived, so I retired to the comforts of a friend's sofa and steadily took the edge off the long drive, sinking bottle after bottle until my eyes became heavy.
London! What a city to awaken to! Up north we have to make do with the soothing morning chorus of wood pigeons and the low electric whine of the occasional passing milk cart. Down in lovely Shoreditch, though, you are roused from your slumber by a hundred foul-mouthed Cockney market traders hawking knock-off designer shoes for a fiver, laughing heartily at complaints that a pirate DVD sold last week didn't live up to its promise ('nah, vat's your trackin', mate. Aural contract - not werf the paper it's printed on'). As soon as you manage to block out the market noise and drift back into your slumber, you are once again jolted awake by an elderly Jamaican gentleman toting a half full can of Tennents Super in one hand, his drug-addled philosophy in the other. It is then that you accept the fact that the next two hours of your life will be accompanied by a backing track of badly rhyming urban poetry/reggae until he is once more swept away on whatever invisible currents of insanity pulled him below your window.
And so it is that, after a brief shower, you head out to sample the delights of London in daylight. Discounting the many architectural delights of the city - among them the whole of Westminster, The Globe, Tower Bridge and the countless hidden gardens in amongst a sea of blue-plaqued townhouses - this amounts to a thousand cubic acres of hobo piss and McDonalds wrappers. Unless you walk around with your eyes closed, only opening them when your guide directs you towards a pretty building, London is ugly. It's so ugly that people applauded when they converted the Bankside Power Station into the Tate Modern, as if this would in some way improve the look of the city. The Tate Modern is so astonishingly, violently, breathtakingly ugly - the kind of building into which you would expect to see thousands of proles file for their two minute hate - that it's almost unbelievable that it now houses art.
It's around this point in the average London jaunt, mid-morning on the second day, that you realise what a mistake it was to spend the weekend. From a distance it seems attractive (but, then, so do I). Up close though, it looks like a dry turd (again, so do I). You watch TV and imagine it as a vibrant place, full of happy, smiling folk going about their lives in the most colourful and exuberant way they can imagine. The embodiment of this, of course, is in the glut of chirpy celebrity chefs the last decade has spawned. The most gratingly vocal of these is Jamie Oliver: a floppy haired young mod with an embarassing lisp who splits his time between squeezing tomatoes in London produce markets and tooling around on a Vespa trying to look cool.
London markets. If you watch Mr Oliver you may imagine that these are wonderful places, full of laughing street traders exchanging witty banter with the punters while selling the ripest, tastiest fruit and veg the nation has to offer. Up close, though, it becomes apparent that they are nothing but barely controlled mobs full of wealthy young idiots named Jasper and Genevieve using their over-sized prams to part the crowds like cowcatchers on the front of a locomotive, while their youngster fondles the swedes with his mucus-covered paws. Of course, you have to visit the market because darling, there's a stall in Spitalfields that sells a wonderful potato and rosemary loaf, and it goes just perfectly with a little feta and the golden tomatoes I picked up on Brick Lane yesterday. It's simply to die for. I just described what is essentially a cheese sandwich. What the fuck's wrong with a bit of cheddar on a slice of Hovis, I ask you? I'd seriously like to know.
So, after violently shoving Jasper and his diseased offspring into a display of fresh ground coffee beans you head back home by way of the Underground. Oh, what a marvel of engineering. A public transport system that operates almost entirely beneath the surface, allowing you to move quickly and comfortably throughout the city without the worry and inconvenience of traffic jams and pedestrians. Of course, you have to make the journey standing up. Jasper beat you there, you see, and he and Genevieve have generously given their little sprog (who is probably named Tarquin) two seats - one for himself and one for his collection of overpriced trinkets from Hamleys. You are forced to tuck your head into you chest to avoid the closing doors of the train and then to stand with one arm clinging to a strap overhead, the other tucked painfully at your side until the blood cuts off, while a clammy-handed, obese mentalist lovingly caresses the nape of your neck with his shoulder for ten stops. All the while Jasper attempts to receive a signal on his mobile phone so he can call his secretary in order to remind the carriage just how fucking important he is. When he finally manages to get through, he insists on using language that would get you lynched in the provinces. We don't tolerate pretentious cunts up north, you see. Carol, can you get in touch with Fraser and remind him that the Marlon Bros. meeting has been pushed back from 3 to 3:05. Then make sure my 2 o'clock gets brought forward to 1:30. Oh, and I'll need to see a copy of the Whittaker account Asap. It is around this point that I violently slap the pompous bastard in the head, issuing a polite reminder that there is no such word as 'Asap'. Ass.
You may notice that I become progressively more irritable as time goes on. This is no accident. London is, it seems, designed to do this. It's as if the city has developed a sort of intelligence - Gaia-esque, if you will - and along with it its own immune system. The city treats me as my body would treat a virus. It systematically attempts to destroy or evacuate me. Jasper, in this flimsy metaphor, is a white blood cell in a Paul Smith jacket. His wife Genevieve and little Tarquin seem to be something useless. I don't know, maybe a spleen.
It's a very effective defense, too. After only a day of exposure to London I can feel myself wilting. Not only does my mood worsen and my general good will toward mankind wilt, I actually begin to show physical signs of deterioration. My hair goes crazy. It becomes a kind of proto-afro, jumping wildly in the city breeze. My skin goes dry in an attempt to escape from me, like a cellular version of rats from a sinking ship. The final straw, though, is when my snot turns black. Blow your nose after a day in the centre of London and it resembles viscous coal. As a smoker I'm no stranger to inhaling pollution, but I prefer to take mine through a cork filter. It's at this point that a sane man decides to leave.
Samuel Johnson famously said: "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." Bollocks. When a man is tired of London he is tired of being squeezed along with seven million people into a space the size of the average bathroom. He is tired of avoiding pigeon shit with every step. He is tired of drinking in bars serving a greater variety of smoothies than they do beer. He is tired of listening to pretentious assholes gush about clothing made from metal ring pulls. He is tired of riding public transport that may explode at any moment - and realising that his last vision on earth would be the moist armpit of a middle-aged account rep from Staines. He's tired of pointless modern art, exorbitant rent and the fact that ordering a cup of coffee involves more decision making than arranging a mortgage - and then having to take out a second mortgage in order to pay for it. He's tired of being roused from his slumber by coarse-mannered recidivists masquerading as honest businessman on a market stall, taxis driven by racists and bigots, and tired of unsafe drinking water.
Of course, all of these reasons are why I'll keep going back whenever they'll have me. It's a a seething pit of hedonism and self-importance; a smoky metropolis packed full of bright lights and disturbing smells. It's Hell, but I fucking love it.
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