by A satirist’s diary on apocalypse-prepared tourists, a date whose card declined twice, and the dialect of pretending rent is fine
Dear diary, today London tried to kill me with weather, public transport, and a single overpriced flat white, in that order. I am Vivienne, I write satire for a living, and I have decided that London life is less a lifestyle and more a low-grade ongoing emergency that we have all agreed to call charming.
London life is an extreme sport with worse equipment
People move to London for the culture and stay for the trauma bonding. Real London life is standing on a platform at Oxford Circus while three full trains pass, each one a sealed tube of human despair, and feeling something close to spiritual acceptance. I have been here long enough that I now judge tourists who look upset about it. Sweetie, this is the deal. You signed up for the museums and the theatre and what you got was a four hundred pound rent increase and a man playing the bagpipes badly outside your window at 6am. The transport authority explains its side of the story at the official transport desk, which is a masterpiece of saying nothing soothingly.
The tourist who packed for the apocalypse
My favourite headline this week, from the London desk, concerns an American tourist who arrived for a weekend with three full outfits, four jackets, and what was described as a small meteorological research team. I want to mock this person. I cannot. They are correct. London weather is not a forecast, it is a negotiation, and the city will give you all four seasons in the time it takes to walk from the Tube to the pub. I have left my flat in sunshine and arrived at a meeting looking like I swam there. The tourist with four jackets understands London better than the locals who insist it will be fine.
I read the report that water bottles are now banned at the World Cup and thought, finally, an institution that hates its customers as much as London hates its commuters. We are kindred. We are the same. The difference is FIFA does it on purpose and London does it through forty years of underinvestment, which I find somehow more honest.
A personal report from the front lines of dating
I went on a date this week with a man who described himself as an entrepreneur, which in London means unemployed with a website. He took me to a bar in Soho where a single cocktail cost more than my first month’s rent in 2019, and he paid for it with a card that declined twice before working, and reader, I have never been more attracted to anyone. There is something genuinely romantic about watching a man’s financial dignity collapse in real time and recover through sheer denial. He is, I suspect, going to be a politician.
We talked about everything. He asked what I do and I said satire and he said oh like the news but mean and I said no, like the news but honest, and he laughed in a way that suggested he had not understood but wanted to seem clever, which is the most London thing a man can do.
The economics of being alive here
Let us discuss money, because London life is fundamentally a money story wearing a culture costume. The general background, for the historically curious, is laid out at the encyclopaedia entry, which is too polite to mention the rent. I pay a sum each month for a flat where I can touch both walls of the kitchen at once, and I describe it to visiting relatives as cosy. Cosy is the London word for small. Vibrant is the word for loud. Up and coming is the word for currently dangerous but cheap. We have an entire dialect built to make poverty sound like a lifestyle choice, and I speak it fluently.
The flatmate situation, an ongoing saga
I should mention my flatmate, because no honest account of London life is complete without the person you share a fridge with and resent quietly for four years. Mine labels her food. Not the perishables, which would be reasonable. Everything. There is a banana in our fruit bowl with her name on a sticker. I have never touched her banana. I would not touch her banana if I were starving in a snowdrift, and yet the sticker remains, a tiny monument to the trust issues that flatsharing breeds in even the kindest people. We are friends. We are close. We have lived through three boilers dying and one ceiling partially collapsing. And still, the banana wears its little name tag, because in London the only thing more precious than space is the illusion that any of it is truly yours.
Why I stay
And yet. Last night I walked home along the river and the whole city was lit up and ridiculous and mine, and a busker was playing something lovely, and a fox crossed the road like it owned it, and I thought, I would not live anywhere else, which is either love or a hostage situation and I have stopped trying to tell the difference. London life is awful and I adore it and both of those things are the entire truth at once.
For the daily dispatch of everything wrong and wonderful with this town, I file alongside the rest of the menagerie at the capital’s least reliable newspaper, which is the highest compliment I can pay it.
More urban absurdity over at The Poke.
