I first came to London to live properly fifteen years ago.
By properly I mean deep within the city of London, not out on the hinterlands, where I’d grown up as a teenager.
For the first six months I was very lonely—I didn’t know that many people here—and I saw a lot of things.
Those first six months in London shaped everything and I am increasingly nostalgic for them.
Funny, that—I guess I have a masochistic streak. When I think back on those periods of my life I’m fond of, most often they are the ones where I was crippled and destroyed by emotional pain.
It was May or June or July when I first settled in London. It was hot. I spent most of my time alone in the porn cinemas and strip clubs. I sought out sordid places. And I was happy in my isolation.
It was sunny, like it is now. And while I had a little bit of friendly interaction with a group of guys and girls I met through my job (I was working for a national newspaper at the time), there was so much about ‘normal life’ that I couldn’t handle.
Still can’t.
Back then I would walk around the East End of London on Sundays in between 12-step meetings staring at the dilapidated buildings and the run-down, deserted weekend streets. Sometimes, I would see couples. Cockneys. Men and women, dressed up to the nines, going out for evening drinks. Often they’d have their kids with them, little dressed-up tykes, prattling and shimmying along behind.
There was something that depressed me about it. They were so—normal. Aspirational families from Hackney or Tower Hamlets, just making a go of things. Been born round here. Lived here all their lives.
Now, my parents are from London, and if you go back further I’m preceded by a long line of Londoners. But still, I was born outside, so I wasn’t from there, this East End. I was an outsider with my nose pressed up against imaginary glass, looking in.
Looking in and wanting to be a part of it and not wanting to be a part of it all at the same time.
I hadn’t come to the city to be normal, you see. I hadn’t come here for family life. Quite the opposite. I was looking for anonymity, thrills, danger.
And yet the Eastenders that I saw—and came to live among—had their own hard-bitten glamour, too. I was—patronisingly—able to position them in my mind up alongside characters in my favourite London movies by the likes of Guy Ritchie (yes, I said it was patronising).
But I felt the distance, still. I existed with a constant awareness of that distance.
But as time has gone on, that distance has reduced. I’ve been here a long time too, now. I have become a part of the surroundings. For better or worse I am a Londoner.
Which is precisely why I’m now contemplating moving to Berlin. I can never allow myself to get to damn comfortable anywhere . . . Although I’ll be back here, soon enough. It’s where I belong, after all.
It is my fifteenth year in London. I’ve grown up with people in this city. I’ve watched their lives move on. Marriage, children, all of that stuff which I normally say sounds like a lot of hard work to me, thank you very much . . .
My life, meanwhile, has remained inevitably the same. I am the one district in London that hasn’t yet been gentrified. The single city centre thoroughfare that’s been left by the politicians and the businessmen to decay. The porn cinemas and the strip clubs have been pulled down around me and still I remain, a solitary monument to whatever.
I walk down Chapel Market in the Islington sunshine. A Bulgarian family sit around an accordion drinking Stella from cans. The discount jewellers is still there, a marker of the shabbier, crappier, old London that I grew up with, that I crave. Because within those old shop fronts and beneath their signs my old life resides, still. My youth.
But they won’t gentrify me. It’s political correctness gone mad these days, and I’m perennial erectness gone bad.
That first six months in London shaped everything, and I crave that old loneliness, that old desolation I felt then still. Perhaps because a part of me has died, cocooned within a city that dies and is reborn constantly, and that waits for no one.
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