R2E #48*: "When a Man is Tired of London..."
He should sit next to me. We'd have a plenty to talk about. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE
TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS AFTER THE START of my daily journal entries, my iron-man writing streak nearly came to an end. I plum forgot to write that night, and shut off the light. But sleep didn’t come easily for me, then or ever, so my mind eventually wandered onto my new habit. That was bound to happen more than a few times in the 15,000 sleepy/drunken/concupiscent nights since the unbroken line of writing began.
But that first forgetting? I nearly lost the string before I started unraveling it! A life unexamined! Unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown! Six million words: poof!
Natalie Goldberg wrote about the addictive process of journal-keeping in Old Friend from Far Away, her amazing book about the practice, theory, and emotion of memoir.
“Writing regularly calms the mind, not because you write about nice things, but because your fears, anxieties, your troubled thoughts know they will have place and time to express themselves. Slowly in this way you will build the story of your life. You will record your experience—all of it, the details and the felt truths below the circumstances.”
Light on! Write on!
So I wrote that night, and every one thereafter, until death do us part.
I had no shortage of material. I loved England. I loved the idea of England! This a scepter’d isle. This throne of kings! This other Eden, demi-paradise!
But London, not so much.
There was so much to complain about, in the presence of indifferent Londoners, who seemed to have taken the seasonal chill and darkness into their souls. My aloneness (more extreme there than anywhere else during my Grand Tour) projected an unfriendly cast over things, but the town was just as nasty as I sensed it to be, in my vulnerability. Shop workers and bartenders were a sneering lot, tossing off words as if they were a “dear” commodity. I was also resentful of the lazy sun, which bedded down at around 3 p.m., in the land of perpetual gloom. And there was risk of my stepping into busy London traffic, with those elegant black cabs hurtling on the wrong side/wrong direction, like killer whales prowling seal harbor.
It would be interesting, I wrote, to see how London looked while in the company of college friends. There were any number of them around, on overlapping adventures. If the town brightened when I joined them, I reasoned, then the fault for my malaise lay within. My “self-determined world” fantasies, expressed so confidently on the train to London, might prove to be a category error.
But if London wasn’t blue, I was.
But what of those unfeeling crowds that jostled me at every turn? At one point during my London stay I was in Euston Station, which had nothing like the romance of the Paris train stations. Monet clearly agreed with me, exalting the Gare Saint-Lazare, but blurring the lines of the Parliament building and the bridges over the Thames, in his England paintings. He didn’t bother painting Euston Station. Maybe he was bilked by ancestors of the same thieves who worked check-desk during my visit, and charged me 60p to stash my umbrella and duffel?
Plenty more rancor in my November 9 journal entry: at the phone company for charging me lots of P for not many minutes on the phone, and at every horrible person in line ahead of me at a tea bar. I eventually reached a cathartic explosion as I navigated the sidewalks of London, muttering angrily: “I hate you, and you all three of you, and [especially to a bobby who spoke brusquely to me], and you also. I hate all of you!” I’ve never loved London the way I have Paris, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Quebec City, Kathmandu, or Nairobi (circa 1980, anyway), so it couldn’t only be self-loathing that colored my vision. In fact, London competes with Moscow for sheer loathsomeness.
That hateful afternoon in London, a pleasant Scottsman on bus #9 talked me out of my gloomy worldview. We must’ve been together on the bus for a while, because he had time to explain that he knew all sorts of famous aviators, had traveled extensively in the U.S., and that his wife was a member of the “Order of the Crown” (whatever that is).
He was friendly. But then, he wasn’t from London.
*On alternating weeks (or, alternately, when the mood strikes) I run excerpts from The Road to Elsewhere, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (The first entry is here. Most recent one is here. Or check out for my complete archive here.) It details the story of my road through Paris, London, and god help me, Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living. The story so far: Young Peter arrived in Paris, occupied a dorm room at the Alliance Française language school, tiptoed out onto the Boulevard Raspail and the Paris Metro, and made the first steps on the road to elsewhere. Hey, kid, why don’t you head for England next?
Another fabulous post, Peter - such great London insights!
But listing black pudding as a con?! Food of the gods, that stuff! In the days when I used to use them, I would judge a hotel by what it chose to include as part of its 'full English breakfast'.
Baked beans? FAIL. Beans are NOT a breakfast item.
Hash browns? FAIL.
Black pudding? YEAH BABY.
My brain would always struggle, though, if beans AND black pudding made it onto my breakfast plate... do they cancel each other out? Short answer: No. The beans are still in the wrong, and black pudding is always going to look shifty in that kind of company...
I recently had cause to wonder what the England equivalent of Wilde’s quote would be, but in the end I’ve concluded that a man (or woman) who is tired of England is simply tired of England – or perhaps just tired of the English, as the soothing greenness of the countryside is always a pleasure. Having done a lot of travelling recently, every time I’ve returned to the UK, I’ve found myself similarly appalled by the numbers of aggressive, careless, selfish and sometimes inordinately fat (clearly the UK is stealing a march on the US in numbers of obese residents) British people, pushing and shoving through banal consumer queues at service stations or crowding airports. The careless hordes and their leftover heaps of rubbish in London are overwhelming, too; they make me want to run for the peaceful greenery of my home in the Chilterns. The only positive thing I can say about the English (I am one too now, btw) is that whereas they used to be far too reserved to chat to strangers on public transport, this is now quite an easy feat. I can only attribute that to an increase in demographic diversity, but would welcome your thoughts on this change as I did not grow up here.