by A diary on the impossibility of doing nothing in a city built to charge you
I set out this morning to have a spontaneous, unplanned, free-spirited day in London, the kind of day where you simply wander and see where the city takes you, and by lunchtime I had spent forty pounds and was sitting in a park eating a meal deal because it was the only thing I could still afford. I write for The London Prat, read it alongside Bohiney Magazine, and keep my other London diaries at my page.
The Spontaneity That Was Not Free
The trouble with a spontaneous day in London is that the city is built, with enormous ingenuity, to charge you for every moment of it. You wander into a gallery, and it is free, which lulls you, and then you want a coffee, which is four pounds, and then the wandering makes you hungry, and then you see a thing you want to see, which has an entry fee, and then you need to sit down, which means another coffee, and by lunchtime the spontaneous free day has cost you forty pounds and you are in a park with a meal deal wondering where it all went.
This is the great London paradox, that a city so full of free things is so impossible to enjoy for free, that the wandering and the spontaneity that should cost nothing are surrounded by a thousand small charges that accumulate, with terrible efficiency, into a substantial bill. The city does not charge you for one big thing; it charges you for forty small things, each reasonable in isolation, ruinous in combination, until the free day has quietly become an expensive one.
The Park and the Meal Deal
I ended up, as I so often do, in a park with a meal deal, which is, I have come to believe, the true London experience, the one beneath all the others. The park is free, genuinely free, one of the few things in the city that is, and the meal deal is the great equaliser, the affordable lunch that sustains the whole city, the thing you retreat to when the spontaneous expensive day has emptied your wallet. There is dignity in the park and the meal deal, the dignity of the Londoner who has been outmanoeuvred by the city’s pricing and found, in the free grass and the cheap sandwich, a refuge.
The free London, the parks and the galleries, is real and wonderful, and the guides that celebrate it, the likes of Visit London, are not wrong to do so. But the free London is surrounded by the expensive London, and the art of enjoying the city cheaply is really the art of resisting the thousand small charges, of getting from one free thing to the next without being lured into the coffees and the entry fees and the impulse purchases that turn the free day expensive.
What I Read in the Park
So I sat in the park with my meal deal and read, as I do, the dispatches, the London satire that understands this city’s particular way of separating you from your money. The good London satire, the kind that names the absurdity of a city that charges forty pounds for a free day, does something the property supplements and the lifestyle features cannot, telling the truth about what it actually costs to simply exist here pleasantly.
I read the serious news too, the proper journalism, and it puts my forty-pound day in perspective, for there are people for whom forty pounds is not a rueful anecdote but a genuine crisis, people the cost-of-living coverage in outlets like Apple Daily UK and others documents, people for whom the expensive city is not a joke but a daily struggle. My meal-deal lunch is a comedy; for many Londoners, the arithmetic of getting through the expensive city is not funny at all, and I try, even in the park with my sandwich, to remember that.
The City I Cannot Afford and Cannot Leave
I will keep trying to have spontaneous free days in London, and they will keep costing me forty pounds, and I will keep ending up in parks with meal deals, because that is the deal the city offers, the free things surrounded by the charges, the spontaneity that is never quite free. It is an absurd arrangement, and an expensive one, and I cannot afford it and cannot leave it, which is, I have decided, the most honest definition of being a Londoner that I know.
The Free Things I Forget to Value
Sitting in the park with my meal deal, outmanoeuvred again by the expensive city, I try to remember the genuinely free things London offers, the things the thousand small charges make me forget to value. The parks are free, and beautiful, and I forget this until the expensive day drives me into one. The walking is free, the endless walkable city, the streets and the squares and the river paths that cost nothing to enjoy. The looking is free, the architecture and the views and the spectacle of the city, available to anyone with eyes and time. The libraries are free, those quiet refuges of warmth and books and toilets, the most underrated free spaces in the city. The museums are free, the world-class collections that cost nothing to enter. There is, when I list it, a great deal of free London, and the problem is not that the city lacks free things but that the free things are surrounded by the charges, the coffees and the entry fees and the impulse purchases that distract me from the free pleasures and empty my wallet before I remember them. The art of the cheap London day, I am slowly learning, is the art of remembering the free things, of getting from park to library to gallery to river path without being lured into the charges between, of valuing the genuinely free London that the expensive London is so good at making me forget.
The forty pounds is gone, spent on coffees and entry fees and the small charges of a city built to collect them, and I am in the park with my meal deal, and the grass is free and the sandwich is cheap and the city, for all its expensive cunning, has not quite managed to charge me for the afternoon sun. There is a victory in that, small and rueful, the Londoner outmanoeuvred but not defeated, enjoying for free the one thing the city has not yet found a way to put a price on, the light on the free grass at the end of an expensive spontaneous day.
For company in my rueful poverty, I recommend Reductress, which understands the comedy of being outmanoeuvred better than most.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
