It’s a long story. It starts with the Romans who everyone knows never did anything for anyone, except in capitals. LONDON. It starts with me, growing up in W8, riding my bike around the block. Grey paving stones. I used to take the Number 10 bus to school and it cost 8p for a child’s fare. The conductor turned his ticket machine with a hand crank so that the gears whirred and printed purple numbers on a ticket slip. The numbers did not correspond to any date, time or route. I used to add them up and take them away from each other to practise my maths.
I had a best friend at school, but no community. I was a bit lonely. Kensington was never a neighbourly neighbourhood. I graduated from university in 1992 in the middle of a recession and there were no jobs so I left for New York. I returned in 1996 and on arrival immediately fell into a depression. I emigrated from west London to north, Highbury N5, and had to find a whole new set of friends and buy trousers and trainers. Arsenal won the Premier League and FA Cup double in 1998, but London was boring after New York, too spread out to gather friends spontaneously, numbing Piccadilly Line commutes, nowhere to get a drink after an evening movie. I left again after two years and didn’t really come back. Tbilisi, Tehran, Baghdad, Beirut, Paris, Cairo, Jerusalem, Boston, Paris. People would say to me: aren’t you frightened in those scary places and I would reply: “there is nowhere in the world more terrifying than getting out of Ladbroke Grove tube at 11 o’clock at night and walking under the Westway flyover among the clots of milling young men jabbing each other and drinking from cans and then having to walk home down one of those dark residential streets with rapistfriendly garden hedges on either side.”
I did not like London.