Dec 8, 2002
Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner
I realised yesterday that I have spent most of my life in London, from toddlerhood to 16, then from 24 until now. For the first three years of that eight year gap, while I was living in Canada, Scotland, Liverpool, Scotland again, Spain, Bolivia, more Scotland, Liverpool again, Manchester and elsewhere, London remained the family base. And not just London in general, either – specific bits, corralled into the west and slightly north, bordered by the Cromwell Road, Finchley Road, East Acton and Golder’s Green.
Since I returned independently to the city after years away, and after my family had moved elsewhere, I found myself (after a brief stint in a damp house in Putney) living in and drawn to the same sort of areas, the places on the periphery of my childhood – Kilburn Park, Maida Vale, West Hampstead, and now West Kensington. West Central, sort of.
Despite this, yesterday I realised that not only do I still have the bias against South and East London which I have nurtured carefully since childhood, as all west London kids should (it’s practically a curriculum subject) (this bias became especially apparent while driving through Dalston on a bustling Saturday afternoon, and hearing news reports yesterday of crazed knife attack at the very same bus stop where I regularly get on the bus to my friend Frank’s house in Brixton), but I have also somehow acquired a curious and totally unconscious bias towards the north, as well.
Not North London, not Finchley or Hendon – no, no. The North.
If someone is from the north, I immediately subconsciously credited them with a bit more common sense, a bit more nouse, knowing what nouse actually means, and being genuinely sound. Until, of course, they open their mouth, at which point they may well prove themselves to be as cocky and ignorant (or braying and prejudiced) as their southern cousins.
You may do the same with people from Ireland, or Scotland, especially if you’re not actually from there but feel a great affinity to the place, through holidays or relatives or music. You may want the individuals from there to be more shining and glorious than they actually are, and in the process overlook the locals who may well be precisely that.
I have to remind myself that regions aren’t good or bad, people are.
