London

London, ah London, the centre of the known universe, the most happening city on the face of the globe, the place where all life exists.  If it doesn’t happen here then it hasn’t existed, everywhere else is in its shade, nothing happens in its purlieus.  It’s a polyglot, a veritable tower of babel with millions of souls and hundreds of tongues and thousands of dialects.  It’s a boiling seething mass of human flesh, a human biomass, always on the go, always on the move, never still.  Everyone is in a hurry.  It’s a wall of sound, a wall of noise pollution with the roaring of the buses, the honking of the horns, the banging and clattering of the lorries and the constant wailing of sirens from the police, the fire, the ambulances and even the bomb squad.  They’re flying form one side of the city to the other, the Sweeney driving though red lights and the wrong way up one way streets. Why don’t they just stay still and spread themselves around the capital?  They’re bound to be near some crime or accident or mishap.  It’s squalor, it’s filth, it’s litter lying everywhere, flotsam, jetsam, detritus, plastic litter in the trees, paper litter in the gutters and human litter lying in the subways, under printed media and cardboard.  It’s concreted over gardens, grass replaced with cars and flowers made way for old mattresses and recycle bins that overflow and spew their contents into the pathways.  It’s steel and glass and stone and tar.  It’s digging holes while others are filling them in, it’s building buildings while others are knocking them down, destruction leading to creation, renaissance from desecration, reincarnation.  Everyone can be somebody but everyone is a nobody comfortable in their own anonymity, the famous rub shoulders with the infamous and the inanimate, the unknown, the unloved and the unwashed.  It’s a collective heaven but a personal hell, the best of times and the worst of times filled with contradictions, opportunities and threats, rich and poor, life and death, love and hate.  You either love it or you hate it and I hate it and can’t wait to get away and back up north.