No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life - Samuel Johnson
You know I feel like a cranky old lady who was betrothed to someone and learned to like it who is now forced to examine internet romances, sometimes, when I look at people squawking “HOME” about places they’ve never been to and certainly won’t so much as visit for the foreseeable future. It seems about as convincing as me addressing the spectre of Courtney Love’s photographs as my wife.
And I know there’s a splutter of indignation in the wake of that remark, so let me clear something up: I didn’t come to London because I loved her. I didn’t even fancy the bitch. Our eyes did not meet across a crowded brochure rack advertising the cities of the world, and for the first years of our acquaintance the only passion in my soul for her was that of pretty virulent hatred.
Ours has not been an easy love. I was briefly into Cambridge, Oxford, Brighton. At times I have been desperate to get away from her, and I did not come to her because I loved her, though I came here because of love.
I came to London because I loved writing, and I was going to learn more: lo, University. There weren’t any other places that would let me write and not ask me to do anything else (Luton does not count), not when the choice was to be made. There was also A Boy, and in the grand tradition of There Was A Boy, he was a glorious evasive mess with scars on his fucked-up heart, and he and the girl who followed in his blood-stained wake (getting half of my attention, a third of my affection, and so much less than she needed or deserved from me) were long gone by the time I came.
I don’t love London for her charm, because I know what an ugly dysfunctional bitch she is underneath it. I don’t love her for her history, since it’s no greater than the mad histories of Moscow and Paris and god knows how many European capitals; I bet Rome could tell you a thing or two. People who sigh over her parks but lament her slums as eyesores are only infatuated with her beauty, and that’s not love.
Ours is, granted, not a healthy love. She doesn’t need me or care about me, but we’ve established that she feels that way about everyone; meanwhile, if I’m too long gone from this cunt whore fucking city I feel acutely homesick, heartsick: like pieces of me are disintegrating. I stop being Delilah Des Anges, the five-eight behemoth the city built out of fragments of troubled girl, and become undifferentiated shyness again. Proto-person.
She beats me. I beat her. She sucks the life out of me in a hundred little ways, but I feel - continue to feel, regardless of raging infections and callow prick politicians and the mud and dung smeared on the pages of papers and the crumbling edifice of freedom shedding flakes about our feet - safer here than anywhere else in the world. Safer in my body, dodging cars and suckling on smoke, than abandoned to the clean hell of Somerset, Devon, Cornwall - the slipshod boot.
And you, you shallow Ancient Greek tart philosophising idiots - ‘how can you love something if it isn’t beautiful’ - as if love didn’t make beauty, not the other way around. Without love your fucking ruins are just pretty, interesting, important.
And you, you stupid fucks - ‘do you mean the city or the people’ - dualistic morons all ‘body or soul’ as if the two were not the same: buildings, roads, river, sewers, cables, populace, trains, smoke, pigeons, rats, rubbish, pirate radio stations, rogue buddleia, planned planters, shops, cyclists - all one great gleaming stinking organism, and I the adoring parasite clinging to her guts.
This postcard-kissing crush you have is not love: I crawled to this shithole rotten in my insides and she reanimated me again and again. I love London the doctor, the prison-warder, because I can’t live anywhere else.
And I know there’s a splutter of indignation in the wake of that remark, so let me clear something up: I didn’t come to London because I loved her. I didn’t even fancy the bitch. Our eyes did not meet across a crowded brochure rack advertising the cities of the world, and for the first years of our acquaintance the only passion in my soul for her was that of pretty virulent hatred.
Ours has not been an easy love. I was briefly into Cambridge, Oxford, Brighton. At times I have been desperate to get away from her, and I did not come to her because I loved her, though I came here because of love.
I came to London because I loved writing, and I was going to learn more: lo, University. There weren’t any other places that would let me write and not ask me to do anything else (Luton does not count), not when the choice was to be made. There was also A Boy, and in the grand tradition of There Was A Boy, he was a glorious evasive mess with scars on his fucked-up heart, and he and the girl who followed in his blood-stained wake (getting half of my attention, a third of my affection, and so much less than she needed or deserved from me) were long gone by the time I came.
I don’t love London for her charm, because I know what an ugly dysfunctional bitch she is underneath it. I don’t love her for her history, since it’s no greater than the mad histories of Moscow and Paris and god knows how many European capitals; I bet Rome could tell you a thing or two. People who sigh over her parks but lament her slums as eyesores are only infatuated with her beauty, and that’s not love.
Ours is, granted, not a healthy love. She doesn’t need me or care about me, but we’ve established that she feels that way about everyone; meanwhile, if I’m too long gone from this cunt whore fucking city I feel acutely homesick, heartsick: like pieces of me are disintegrating. I stop being Delilah Des Anges, the five-eight behemoth the city built out of fragments of troubled girl, and become undifferentiated shyness again. Proto-person.
She beats me. I beat her. She sucks the life out of me in a hundred little ways, but I feel - continue to feel, regardless of raging infections and callow prick politicians and the mud and dung smeared on the pages of papers and the crumbling edifice of freedom shedding flakes about our feet - safer here than anywhere else in the world. Safer in my body, dodging cars and suckling on smoke, than abandoned to the clean hell of Somerset, Devon, Cornwall - the slipshod boot.
And you, you shallow Ancient Greek tart philosophising idiots - ‘how can you love something if it isn’t beautiful’ - as if love didn’t make beauty, not the other way around. Without love your fucking ruins are just pretty, interesting, important.
And you, you stupid fucks - ‘do you mean the city or the people’ - dualistic morons all ‘body or soul’ as if the two were not the same: buildings, roads, river, sewers, cables, populace, trains, smoke, pigeons, rats, rubbish, pirate radio stations, rogue buddleia, planned planters, shops, cyclists - all one great gleaming stinking organism, and I the adoring parasite clinging to her guts.
This postcard-kissing crush you have is not love: I crawled to this shithole rotten in my insides and she reanimated me again and again. I love London the doctor, the prison-warder, because I can’t live anywhere else.