I remember now why I moved to Edinburgh all those years ago. I hate London. It repulses me from such a deep and integral part of me that I just feel off when I'm here. The place itself is tarnished and filthy, corroding into an underworld of offensive dirt. The people aren't real.. you get the painfully cool kids who think they're effortlessly different from the rest when in fact they're so caricaturised that it's hard to separate them from the stereotypes before, the wannabe born and bred londoners who are extra bolshy for the sheer hell of it- who act like they own the joint and the rest of the distasteful crowd. Only once in a while do you catch the eye of someone equally lost in such a scene of Dante's Inferno that is the tube and register a mutual humanity in each other. These are the people who are still disappointed in the encroaching rudeness of the masses, the lack of consideration for others, the sheer selfish hedonism displayed by most. It always shocks me when someone less able is surprised that I should let them have my seat. What else am I supposed to do? A young, able-bodied woman shouldn't let an old person stand, however embarrassing it might be to have to address someone on the tube.
It reminds me of my school days everytime I'm here. All the girls comfortable in their middle-class insobriety, spending money like it's going out of fashion because daddy's a banker/lawyer/doctor and can't do enough for his princess. Spending it on drink, cigarettes and drugs, passing pleasures which they'll only piss out, throw up or snap out of in a short time. These girls, with their prejudice and their own rules of cool, who decided, at 14, that the mark of distinction was how many cigarettes you could buy without being IDed, how thin you could get without being discovered, how many boys from the local public school you could suck off without your best friend of the week realising you'd gone with her 'boyfriend'. All these girls, so wrapped up in their shallow existence, the materiality of adolescence while girls like me are stuck at home at the weekend, helping to care for a senile grandmother. Them not understanding that having no money means no money- means not buying clothes (thank god for school uniforms) means not wanting to spend money on temporary pleasures, means not being free at the weekends, or in the evenings because you're working an extra shift at sainsbury's.
All these girls who bully the more unfortunate because they're easily spotted as not 'one of them'. These girls who've become nothing much because they never really worked, who've grown into selfish adults because they've never been forced to see how privileged they are, who are content to live on the surface of life just parasitically being off other people's good nature and hard work. People who've perfected the art of cool, of conforming to what the crowd dictates without appearing forced. Who have the audacity to carry on judging others, patronising those who are less privileged because they assume that everyone wants to be them.
Sometimes, in the sea of people like these- they all seem to love the impersonality and crassness of london- you'll catch the eye of someone who thinks like you, who's developed from years of bullying and know what it is to treat others with respect, who appreciates small kindnesses and you'll know that there's still a spark of life in an otherwise dead sea. London is over, it will self implode from its own greedy cool and when it does, I'll be where the real people live, enjoying their kindness and solidity. If school taught me something, it was to never be sycophantic to those who got ahead by selling their moral and social code.
