London the boring, malignant octopus
As few cool and interesting people can afford to live in the capital, London is becoming a lot more Bonn than bon
Happy Shrove Tuesday, cherished readers. If you haven’t gone to bed yet, don’t forget to leave some eggs and glass of limoncello out for Father Pancake.
I write from London. Home of the cockney, as the narrator of 1980s crime documentary Dangermouse put it.
These days, the streets aren’t quite so filled with cockneys, doing their little funny dances and inhaling whelks and eels into their funny little faces. The remaining pubs are a piano, knees-up, and have-a-banana free zone.
Just you’re worried this is going to turn into a taxi driver style rant, rest assured: I know my class enemies arrive by private jet, and not by small boat or three-day coach journey from Eastern Europe.
As ever, land and property ownership is the big ol’ issue here.
Recently my sister announced she’s getting out of the capital - off to the midlands, where the rent is slightly cheaper and she has a half-decent chance of living near a support network.
The last straw for her and her husband was being shown around some sawdust ‘n’ despair new-build somewhere on the edge of Kent - destined to be underwater far sooner than Busted predicted.
My sis looked at the endless identikit houses and concreted-over lawns, and asked the estate agent where she could buy a pint of milk.
Oh, he said, surprised. You can drive to a supermarket, I suppose.
She is the last of our family to be forced out, and so feels a line in the sand of sorts.
Last year, trapped endlessly waiting in a hospital with my auntie, the topic of housing came up. She seemed sad, but accepting, of the fact her kids and grandkids wouldn’t be able to live in the city she and they were born in.
Obviously this isn’t just a London problem. The way things are going, within a decade or two being able to live where you grew up will be a place limited either to the very rich or the people cursed to live in Ilkeston.1
And that’s bad, I think? I don’t know, you don’t see much in the news about it. Maybe others agree.
I thought I would be here forever.
One thing that is weird about London, though, is how boring it is now.
I do a listings newsletter for Brighton, and like everywhere the independent arts and culture scenes have taken a massive hit, as austerity rolls ever on and we enter a permanent-state of late capitalist banal dystopia euphemistically known as the “cost of living crisis”.
But still. Last week I could have…
Watched a play about one of the first out trans men in Britain.
Enjoyed Afghan musicians playing instruments I’ve never seen before.
Gone to a zine making session.
Headed to a cabaret full of weird characters, slithers of gold, and plenty of flirtations with disaster.
Gone to a storytelling event full of glorious weirdos and nerds.
It’s a long way from being perfect.
But there’s energy there, and excitement, and possibility.
London, meanwhile, feels mainly full of joggers and 4x4s, presumably owned by other, rival joggers.2
And people I know who would still love to be making stuff here are instead in Oxford, Bristol, Glasgow, Cardiff, Kent, Berlin, Istanbul, Madrid, and Ilkeston.
None of this is good, is what I’m saying.
The one thing I miss is the Prince Charles Cinema, as Brighton doesn’t have a proper oddball independent cinema. But now even that is under threat from a rapacious landlord who is mysteriously chummy with the mayor.
It all feels a bit, you know, crap. Soon the West End will enter the American sweet shop event horizon. The future is a giant sassy M&M stamping on a human face, forever.
The thing is though, lots of people I really like still live in London. I still run a sketch comedy night in London.
There are dogs of my acquaintance in London.
I’ll keep coming. But it’s not mine any more.
And I might just be making my peace with that.
I have been immortalised in a tattoo
One of my London friends who isn’t going anywhere any time soon is Chloe, who lives near Tooting Common and is one of the best people I know.
She’s also recently been really getting into tattoos. Her latest memorialises me and Geoff, her indie disco buddies of yore, in the form of a pair of converse, presumably from before they got bought out by Nike.
I say memorialised but as far as I know me and Geoff aren’t dead yet, so perhaps that’s not quite the right word.
Either way, I’m extremely honoured, and very much in need of a dance.
Upcoming gigs
This Machine Kills Wasps, my alternative music and comedy night, returns to the gorgeous Folklore Rooms on Friday 21st March. The Highchurches are playing and we’ve written some new songs. The lineup is all sorts of insane, fun is guaranteed. Please come along and maybe come to a terrible indie disco with me afterwards.
There’s no March Next Level Sketch, but a few of us will be performing sketches at The Glitch on Friday 28th March. More details when we have them.
That’s it for this week. Thanks, as always, for reading. Sorry this one is a bit rambling. Normal-ish service will be resumed soon enough. Think of this as a rail replacement bus of a post, metaphorically speaking.
Cheap joke about Ilkeston aside: My new home of Brighton - or London super mare, as it’s been jokingly called for centuries - isn’t far behind. Labour council chief Bella Sankey, who has the air of a school bully from a minor public school, has been threatening to kick residents in temporary accommodation out of the city. Her Blairite council are fully into the austerity kool aid, just like their heroes in Westminster.
There’s also these strange places where you can cycle a static bike in front of a video screen, and… themed darts and golf bars?
And Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre is long gone, re-emerging from the ground as flats no one will ever be able to afford to buy.
