In the big smoke
Transient, atomised and yet enormous.
An overpriced dinner and overpriced drinks. Dead, joyless faces, carrying upon them the weight of a city that no longer cradles the things that make us human. It would seem that any trip to the capital is seldom rememberable, other than the damage it does to my bank balance, or the faces of the city’s strangers that are etched into my mind and yet simultaneously blend into one.
Though, I can live with the cost of things. London has always been dearer than the rest of the country; it is just the way of the world, and to request anything else would be to ask water to dry and wine to sober up. It is not then London's prices that disturb me so, but its miasma of modern life. It has always been crowded, but today it feels impossibly so. It has always been expensive, dirty, loud, cosmoopolitan, but today it feels impossibly so.
Where London once filled me with wonder, it now just makes me feel nauseous, disorientated, lost, alone, and hopelessly foreign. It is where I feel the most conquered. London is conquered land, not by any group in particular, but rather by the citizen of the world, the inhabitant of tomorrow. Gangs of imposing men, speaking other tongues; who blast tacky music from tiny speakers, knowing with certainty that they will go unchallenged, lest some brave (or foolish) soul is willing to take a hiding in the name of peace and quiet. They know this because they know that they walk on conquered soil.
The Englishman is made so meek by circumstance that he is no longer willing to defend the sanctity of his capital city. As I walked from Chinatown to Picadilly Circus, I saw the true tragedy of London.
So thrown open to the world is London, that she has lost any identity she may have once bore. It is perhaps the same in every major Western city, that every corner, crack, and crevice betrays a truth we all know, that it was not always like this, and does not need to be like this.
Diversity is the death of culture, the death of vibrance, community, while professing to be the root cause of all three. It is, in real-world terms, a small room; filled to the brim with people who have absolutely nothing in common. It is this that enables covens of gangsters, from lands elsewhere, to violate the peace and go unpunished; for alien religions to impose their sacraments upon the monuments of men who'd weap if they could see from beyond. It is where veterans ball up in the streets, slathered in frostbite, their service long forgotten, while once-enemy militants are housed with priority. It is the twitching corpse of a once proud civilisation, that has lost faith in itself to such an extent that what can only be considered a constant pantomime of self-abasement is normal, exciting even.
Nothing about this place is British. It is gangland, the second homes of oligarchs and moguls. Transient, atomised and yet enormous.
It is also the city of great ironies; a living, festering oxymoron. She has, in tandem, the best and the worst of British urban scenery. The dilapidated, crime-infested slums of the city's east are matched by the pleasant greens and townhouses of the west end; Kensington, Chelsea, Richmond et al. Yet the nicer, and more liveable the area, the less realistic it is to live there. London represents a microcosm of where we sit as a country and as a civilisation.
