I lived in London for three and a half years, but looking back on it now, I’m aware of the fact that I never really made it my own. Indeed, having now spent the last week in east London – at a couple of grim Airbnb flats in Whitechapel – and while bouncing around between meetings and dinners and events in Shoreditch and Hackney and the City of London, it’s become apparent that I did not, in fact, really live in that London which people think of and attracts foreigners and British outlanders alike in their millions. I lived in Greenwich, and spent lovely days and evenings and weekends traipsing through the parks and suburbs of the southeast – but there was a sort of endless suburban feel to it. I think the fact that I often rented a Zipcar and did errands by car sort of sums it up: London, proper, is a city of the tube and black taxis and walking shoes. My time in there allowed me to have a quick commute to Canary Wharf, and while Greenwich had an amazing sort of village feel to it which definitely made it an English experience, it wasn’t really London.
Working in Canary Wharf only made that worse. Canary Wharf is essentially Singapore, or Tyson’s Corner, or Bellevue, Washington: sterile postmodern canned urban developments, with stylish glass and metal skyscrapers, pre-cast parks and open spaces with Meaningful Fountains and Abstract Public Art, waterscapes with outdoor cafes and pubs that would never in a million years attract real human beings but which are perfectly designed for post-work drinking binges by miserable overpaid professionals trying to forget how desperately meaning-free their lives are. Given that that was me at the time, I suppose it felt more or less correct – but it wasn’t good. So I would commute to my pretty little English riverside town, with its twee pubs and picture-perfect butcher shop and florist and a newsagent that could have been pulled from a BBC backlot, to escape the feeling that I was working in a modern hell. But it was all engineered.
London, proper London, the London I’ve gotten to live in this week, is not that at all. It is messy, with no reliable street layouts and a gobbledegook mix of brick and masonry architecture mixed with Brutalist monstrosities whereever the Luftwaffe bombs had managed to find a hit. Even as strange 21st century dagger-like skyscrapers go up everywhere in the City of London, the streets remain as narrow as the smaller alleyways in Manhattan, making it seem incredible that the steel girders and concrete required for such buildings could navigate their way to a building site. Mostly, though – and again, even with the new buildings and all of their sheer scale – London is a deeply human sized city.
I had the weekend free and was going to go hiking, but the hike I signed up for was cancelled – not enough people, which struck me as amazing as the day was spectacular – and I ended up getting a few books and having a good reading day, bouncing from pub to pub across town. I started at a proper local in Whitechapel – cheap beer, dodgy guys smoking pot in the garden and offering to sell me some, a gaggle of millenials fresh from Saturday morning club football watching the midday match, some old guys with maybe a dozen teeth between them wearing tattered team shirts and speaking some incomprehensible local dialect, and me, reading a book about the history of German culture written in the style of, well, this blog. It was very fun, but after a couple of hours and a growing crowd of actual football fans eyeing my prime seat directly in front of the television, I figured I had overstayed my welcome. I got up and headed west, towards my dinner in five hours time.
I then went to a pub close to Liverpool Street Station I had been to in the past – I used to get my head shaved at a Turkish barber nearby, the kind of place that covers your face in lightly scented steaming hot towels, with bearded Turks using straight razors which would not be out of place in a Rudolph Valentino Arabian nights silent film to carve your skull into a gleaming shiny dome. I’d go to the pub afterwards, my head freezing even on warmish days (it only ever gets warmish in London) after the polishing, and would have a pint and sit in oversized leather armchairs and read the paper. I got my pint, found an armchair, and settled in and felt how the crowd had changed in the four years since I had been there last. Quite a lot, really: more kids and strollers now, although the parents were as tattooed as they had been when I had, presumably, last seen them. More people but somehow just a bit quieter, with fewer spilling out into the street for cigarettes and 20-something mid afternoon face sucking. It has always struck me how the English step outside for their passionate kisses – it’s both polite and strange, given that it essentially makes the sidewalk a giant oral fixation zone.
I read more of my book – getting up well past the Thirty Years War and entertaining asides regarding the second worst museum in Ingolstadt and the like – and then got up and headed towards my last destination, which turned out to be quite close so I took a very roundabout walk to get there. Shoreditch and Brick Lane had really changed. When I had been there in the past, on my way to and from the barber, it was easy to feel like this was still a bit of a combat zone. The “men’s sauna” behind the wine warehouse was gone, replaced by a seven story small masterpiece of a building now being used for startup co-working spaces. The smoky pub with bookies stalking the boozers that used to have a stall outside selling whelks and snails for snacks was also gone, replaced by a gleaming black and white tile espresso stand with single-estate coffees and little glasses of sparkling water. The crowds – much like at my old pub – were just subtly different, though. The street hawkers and many of the foundations of the crowds were still East Asian and working class, but now the middle stuffing had changed. Not quite aging hipsters, I suppose – that sort of boundary group that’s no longer kids but still trying to pretend, no doubt excitedly buying pot or harder drugs for their evening but eyeing the parents with their Maclaren strollers with just the start of a tinge of guilt and envy. And the tourists at the top were definitely different. Before the tourists were slummers – looking for the dirty underside of London, the first world equivalent of German sex tourists in Bangkok – but now they were looking for trends and food carts.
My friend showed up, we had a bottle of wine and talked for a couple of hours and then went out for dinner, which was in a restaurant that not only could have been a film set, but it actually was – the square it was on had been closed off earlier in the day to film a scene which had apparently involved a drenching rainstorm on a lovely day. The food was what I had come to expect in London in 2017 – trying too hard to be good looking on the plate, with a laundry list of spices seemingly chosen to demonstrate both political correctness and the latest half-baked theories of longevity and memory preservation, and tasting and smelling exactly alike from one dish to the next, dessert (“pudding”) included. Even my cocktail was strange: sage has no place in a drink. But the conversation was good.
And I am suddenly reminded of something I’ll miss about Seattle. The food in Seattle is really, really good – it’s taken a turn towards gastropubby glutonous recently, but it all works. They really don’t try to screw things up by catering to hipster trends. There was a really interesting place that opened just as I moved back, an Indian fusion place that tried way too hard, and it died in about 90 days. I have a sense that in London it would have become a sort of “must be known” hit, but in Seattle, people had enough sense to realize that it just wasn’t working. And that’s a good thing – at least on one, narrow dimension, that of taste. Savor what food brings to you because it’s good, not because it hits a list of required dimensions.
Seattle seemed distant to me on a lot of other dimensions – sound in particular, but also sight, the light of the endless overcast winter, the excuses given (“well, the skiiing is good nearby” / “isn’t it fun to go the Olympic peninsula and watch the storms” / “it makes you appreciate the light in summer”). But I’m color blind, so visuals are too easily excused – and sound can be replaced in the quiet of an apartment with a halfway decent radio. But savor – taste – smell – I can’t ignore those. Here in London the “scene” that I was a part of as an overpaid banker was just insipid. Again, though, the contrasts are entertaining. I had an “informational interview” – translation: pathetic dance of employer in need of talent but unsure of what to look for, potential employee in need or (in my case) in want of opportunity but not sure what’s on offer – with the treasurer of a large global bank on Monday afternoon. We talked about a number of things but dinner came up. He was going to an insipid traditional French place and seemed pleased; after the conversation, I walked back to my east London garbage Airbnb and stopped by a takeaway curry house. It turns out it’s the favorite spot of a friend of mine in Alberta, and sure enough, the lamb tandoor and saag paneer feast I had was far better than any other food I had had since I’d been here. And better than any Indian food I could ever get in North America.
Sound, though, was an area that Seattle really failed. I went to concerts, I listened to radio, but it was all kind of… uninteresting. But on Sunday night, I went to a concert that I had found online, in a rooftop apartment in Shoreditch. About eighty people all gathered to hear random local opera singers and West End musical theater singers give a recital, plus a concert pianist who played during the intermissions. I love sound – one of the things that puzzled me about my marriage was the lack of music in it, and being on my own, I now try to let music inhabit as much space and time as I can. This recital was stunning – even the musical theater bits were done with flair and competence, despite the banality of the actual material – and for three hours I felt like I was not just in my own skin, but that my skin was resonating, vibrating with a room that was completely taken over by the sound of human voice and human musical instruments. I cried freely, especially during a Lizst sonata (the Dante sonata) because the vibrations could penetrate me fully and I let them do it, and since I was off to the side a little, in a hanging chair suspended from a wooden ceiling beam, no one noticed.
The concert space was a rooftop open plan apartment that looked suspiciously like someone had copied the floorplan of the apartment in “Friends”, right down to the slanty windows overlooking the building across the street – which made no sense on the TV show, but as a concert space, it worked perfectly. There were three sets and five performers, so I thought, but at the end of the second set, the guy who had been serving drinks – lousy prosecco, cans of crappy local craft beer (English ale is good, English craft beer is not), and mugs of tea – came out and sang two numbers as a “special guest performer”. One song was from “Les Miserables” and the other a duet with a stunningly good looking woman, from “Phantom of the Opera”. I can’t really describe how much I dislike modern musical theater, and the tunes he sang were of the worst sort. He even had that self-satisfied look that modern musical theater performers seem destined to have: a starry, faraway look in his eyes, staring over the audience at some distant point where, presumably, he saw his muse. I didn’t cry freely during those pieces; I scanned the audience, marvelling at how the other people had tears in their eyes during such numbers, and felt slightly queasy.
What was entertaining, though, was the master of ceremonies during these performances of the drinks guy. Mistress of ceremonies, I suppose; she was also a singer, and sang a lovely “My Funny Valentine” to open the second set. She introduced the drinks guy, though, saying she lived with him and practiced the “Les Mis” piece over and over together in their apartment, and hoped it sounded better in the atmospheric rooftop space we were in than it sounded in their flat. She introduced him flatly, though, and could barely look at him as he came up to the piano and thanked her for all her help and then turned and assumed his cosmic gaze and, thus acquiring his meaning and depth in preparation, began to sing his modern pap. She played the piano beautifully, he sang well, and they looked at one another politely during the applause afterwards but she quickly looked down, blushed deeply, and rushed to the back of the audience.
He then said he would sing a duet from “Phantom”, which induced a kind of panic in me as I could guess the tune and knew it would be stuck in my head for days, and the other woman came up to join him, with another piano player sliding behind them to take his place. The mistress of ceremonies, now in darkness in the back, looked away and started crying. The duet opened up, the two singers doing the hand holding and mild acting which I suppose Andrew Lloyd Webber would have thought appropriate for the hamfisted lyrics and earworm chords of the centerpiece of the work that paid for his third home and NetJets card, the emotions of the singers as deep and meaningful as the song itself. The lights were dim but bright enough to see the mistress of ceremonies lost in her own kind of hell, of lost love for a man whom she still lived with but who clearly felt nothing for her. Nevertheless, she took some pictures of the drinks guy with his duet partner, basking the glory of the spotlight and the rapture of the audience. Despite her sadness, she gave him his moment.
At the end, the crowd applauded with more than the normal vigor, more than they had given the aria from “La Traviata” or to the concert pianist who had given us Schubert and Chopin. I clapped politely. The mistress of ceremonies wiped her tears, came back to the front to thank the duo and close the set, and reminded us that the bar would be reopening for the break. Her flatmate came back to earth and resumed his place pouring cheap drinks.
And I felt like I had started to claim London for myself, for the first time in a very long time.
Lahore?
Yes indeed… 195 Commercial Road or thereabouts