Today marks the ten year anniversary of my return to London. Although I wasn’t born here, I grew up in this big, weird, expensive, dirty, sprawling mass of inhumanity, and went through primary and secondary schools before leaving, aged 16, to attend college in Canada.
After college, I headed for Scotland, and by the time I’d descended from the highlands, my family home had moved away from London to the north of England. I never identified as a Londoner in the first place - not born here, parents from elsewhere - and I’d left a few years earlier anyway, but by 1992 I wasn’t even a non-Londoner not-living in London anymore.
Several years of studying, working and living around the UK and around the world, followed.
But in 1998, I applied for a job in London, got it, and made the move over a chllly weekend in October by means of a backpack and a borrowed suitcase.
In the ten years I’ve been in London this time around - the longest I’ve lived in any place, ever - I’ve lived in seven houses, with ten flatmates (including one I never met; two Australians; two South Africans; one Irishman; one Nuzzlander; four bloggers; and one lovely husband) and one small brown cat, in five postcodes (all west of Hampstead Heath, east of Kew Gardens, north of the South Circular and south of the North Circular). I’ve changed jobs several times - sometimes within the same organisation - and have spent I don’t know how much on travelcards over the decade of commuting.
So here’s where I am.
It is said that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, which, if it equally applies to women, I think must make me pretty sleepy, actually. Because I am. Tired, that is.
Tired of nonthinking wankers putting their feet on seats on the train despite notices and common sense dictating otherwise.
Tired of dog shit on the pavements and pigeon shit everywhere else.
Tired of irritating little scrotes who terrorise the neighbourhood at Halloween, and every other night, because machismo swagger is cool.
Tired of bus drivers who can’t, and people jumping queues because they can.
Tired of spending three hours a day in transit, on public transport system which is overpriced and underdelivers constantly.
Tired of idiots with giant SUVs parking inconsiderately or driving like asshats, and boyracers booming out their shitty taste in beats and bass through smoked windows as they cruise by.
Tired of summers to hot and clammy and winters too utterly blah to be felt.
Tired of NIMBY attitudes towards local development, which mean no proper infrastructure, but god forbid anyone should turn down their conservatory planning application.
Tired of accents which grate and cloying aftershave on poorly-ventilated trains.
Tired of neighbours too close for comfort, living in enforced communality, not community.
Tired of planes droning overhead from 4 every morning.
Tired of not being able to let the cat out because the risks of her getting run over/mauled by urban fox/tortured by local scrotes is too much to bear.
Tired of pollution getting up my nose, literally, so my snot turns black after a day in the city, and tired of having to wash my hair every single day to get all the yuck out.
Tired of spending and spending and spending on rent, travel, food, council tax, everything, haemorrhaging cash for the privilege of staying in the capital.
Tired of sitting in traffic; standing in crowds; constantly being surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people, and they’re all in my way.
Tired of being hours of travel away from friends, family, mountains, the sea, silence.
There are lots of things to love about London, I know, and I expect I’ll return to them at some point within these pages. But at the moment, on this anniversary day, after ten years here, I’m not really feeling them. I don’t love this place; I loathe it, I resent it, I’m sick and tired of it.
Give me a reason to feel at all different, please.
Why don’t you just .. leave? And find a nice and quite place to live in stead? You can always visit London if the need arises.
I sympathise, Meg. If it helps, most of the items on your list also apply to small towns, large villages…in fact everywhere there are Other People.
On the plus side, it’s a lot easier to escape from the city. London has plenty of train stations and airports to spirit you away to quieter climes. It also has fantastic choice; my small town has but a couple of pubs (only one of which I would chance my life in!) and almost no non-British-food-serving restaurants. There’s only so much scampi and chips a girl can take.
And ten years is a long time to live in the same city. A change is a good as a rest, in my experience :)
Doesn’t matter where you go, you’ll find that NIMBY attitude. In fact it’s BANANA attitude now - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
Meg, I felt exactly the same as you (except I call the SUV people arsehats) and got out 11 months ago, just 50 minutes from Waterloo to the Mole Valley. Stopped working for other people and run my own business and help bring up my two kids. It’s fucking heaven.
Go to the Isle of Wight for a bit. After a bit of lovely peace and quiet, full of fields and elderly people, you’ll either be longing for London or you’ll want to move there.
I understand entirely how you feel, and when I feel the same I remind myself of the fantastically interesting history, the amazing buildings, the museums and the fact that you can get pretty much anything you want at any time.
Methinks it’s time to go to some place you want to be. Life is too hard to be ‘tired of’ in your skin.
@girlinthecafe: Well, apart from my job and my husband’s job, there is NO reason why we couldn’t move somewhere else. And if we stayed in those jobs, there’s nothing stopping us from moving outside, I guess, except for elongated commutes which might make us even more grumpy.
If you are at the point where you really hate it, you should leave because there is no point in being unhappy. My reasons for staying (the ones completely unrelated to being near most of my friends and family) are: Brompton Cemetary, living near my beloved Chelsea FC, shops you can walk to and that are open past 6pm, the view from Hungerford Bridge, being near good theatre, night buses, good restaurants, that if you want to go out you can usually find something to do at the last minute.
But I do consider myself a Londoner and I still love the place and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else….
I left.
The scrotes are everywhere else as well. All bus drivers everywhere suffer from the same Binary-Brakes problem as your local ones. The traffic, by and large, is substantially worse in places with no public transport to speak of. And as others have noted, planning is bent as a nine pound note no matter where you go.
If you want out you have to change jobs, because commuting into London from outside is featured prominently in ‘Inferno’ (and not in the early chapters, either). London’s suburban hinterland, meanwhile, is a sprawling craphole of awful.
Granted, if you get right out of it, it can be a lot cheaper. But then if you don’t want to be somewhere you can’t get a pint of milk at 11pm, there aren’t many towns which have places to live very near the dead centre which are pleasantly habitable.
Assuming you don’t want to leave the UK, I recommend either Edinburgh — ‘cos a nice place in Marchmont allows you to be a pedestrian and probably costs slightly less than wherever you are now — or moving much further into the centre of London (which normal people can’t afford).
Me, I left after two years of construction on Stratford International were topped off with the announcement that the Olympics were to be built literally at the end of my street, and the realisation that it was costing us £16k just to be there, excluding luxuries like food. We went to Cork four years ago and just bought a small house for less money than *any* tiny flat can be had in E15, which is seven minutes on foot from the very centre of town. But then everybody chez moi works from home.
Hey MsP.
Given that you’re renting, you’re fairly mobile. Wy don’t you optimise the London experience in terms of your commute, and move to a completely different area?
You know I always whinge about Streatham but there’s a ton of half way decent places to live south of the river - if you check out the Thameslink line, it only takes 22 minutes on the train to get to Farringdon from here. My cat is an outdoorsy cat and I never see him but I know he’s safe, the transport links are pretty good and there’s a very good Indian takeaway that home delivers! Tooting is similarly delightful in spots and also contains a Betteridge/Plowright ie: there are multiple opportunities for effortless ‘hanging out’.
I know exactly what you mean, and I feel similarly hamstrung but since working out what exactly the ‘change’ required is can sometimes take time, it could be the case that a small change of environment might change your stte enough to make you more confident about getting your shit together and getting out?
Besides which, I know that the south London crew would all be completely delighted by increased proximity!
I could not agree with you more.
Kev and I feel exactly the same way. We’d both move to the countryside like a shot, and I’d ever be prepared to re-learn to drive (haven’t for, oh, a very long time). But I wonder what we’d do for work. Somehow, London seems to have a choke hold on us, work-wise. I keep talking about becoming ‘non-geographic’ but the more I talk about it the harder it seems to achieve.
We have a vision of living somewhere in the countryside, (don’t ask which country - we haven’t even got that figured out yet), with lots of cats and a little space and neighbours we can’t hear or see. We both grew up in the countryside and are quite happy with the idea of living somewhere that you can’t just pop to the corner shop and go there and back in less than five minutes.
I just can’t quite figure out yet how to get from here to there.
When we left, back in 2001, we were so sick of it all that we took a huge gamble. (Very unlike us, we’re not usually risk-takers.) We just bought a house in a tiny Wiltshire village and moved and *hoped for the best*, thinking that one of us might be able to find a job once we’d done it. When I look back on it, I’m amazed that we even considered it.
And to our further amazement, it worked. My wife got a job very quickly, my freelance work continued as expected. And we settled in, had a kid, made new friends, moved house once again, and settled in some more. It worked out fine.
Every time we visit London, we remember why we got out.
Hey Meg-
I used to live out there and I can’t imagine commuting everyday without my motorbike. One day without it turned me into a massively annoyed and useless stressball.
Having recently moved into central London, I can say that it is considerably less stressful to be able to walk to work and yet still have the buzz of the city around you. And its much quieter on the weekends and at night than Barnes could be at times. And being able to choose from more than a handful of pubs/restaurants you can walk home from at night is also quite nice. Also I am able to enjoy shopping or any other after-work activity without having to think about the long commute home.
I do miss the river, and the quirkiness of the area, (for example, did you ever find out about that block of wood locked up in front of the school?) but I can visit any time I like. Rents have gone down a bit recently, you might be surprised to find central London fairly affordable now. It won’t make any difference to your cat though, but I suppose in a real rural area you would still have to worry about wild life.
-s
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