London Life – Month 2 – The Darker Side

It’s been two months now since I moved to London and it feels like forever. I am not sure how long I will keep up this pseudo “journal” but two months in definitely feels different to one. I wish I had moved to London years ago, I’m still loving it, but there have certainly been elements that have taken the shine off it. The honeymoon period is over. It’s a huge, global, dirty, brilliant, horrible city. That is just the way it is. Loveless sex, overpriced drinks and a lot of standing up on trains.

This may have happened within month one, who cares, but I returned home from an evening out to my local station to be met by a a policewoman who told me to leave via the side exit as there “had been a stabbing.” To be fair, she didn’t have to say stabbing, she could have said “incident.” It didn’t make the walk home that relaxing. But when I told someone this, they asked if I was bothered. And I wasn’t. I know I live in a nice area. Unfortunately, this is London. It happens all the time, far too frequently. I saw the an Evening Standard headline today (more on that paper later) and the headline read “Year of knife crime the worst ever.” Depressing isn’t it? But not surprising when police funding has been slashed along with local councils. Since then someone has killed themselves on the line – I imagine that may well happen around London almost weekly. I don’t even want to look up the figures.

But does violence concern me? Of course not. I’ve lived in one of the nicest areas of Liverpool and some bloke got shot dead outside a pub one day. The most eyebrow raising thing about the whole incident was that the getaway driver used to be in Brookside.

Two months in, London can feel like a cold and not very nice place at times, there is no doubt about that. You find yourself getting sucked into it. I was in a rush waiting for a bus outside Waterloo and there was a homeless guy collapsed. Unconscious. Luckily someone had rung an ambulance. But it wasn’t me. London makes you selfish, it can make you blind to horrendous things and it’s not good. I work in the ridiculously affluent area of Richmond – all Range Rovers, Gin & Tonics and poor man Patsy Stone’s. You walk past a homeless person every few hundred yards, some obviously genuine, some obviously not. But who do you choose to help? How can you feel like you are making a difference. I have decided the best way is to commit to buying the Big Issue regularly.

They must be suffering from the contactless revolution for a start.

And I’ve stopped bothering to pick up The Evening Standard. Once or twice was enough. Not only is it Osbourne’s fucking mouthpiece, it makes me want to stab my eyes out as much as The Metro. All rich hipsters and houses I can’t afford because I spent all my money having a good time…