On Thursday I met someone in a bar who talked a lot about how she is moving to London in six weeks. “I’ve always wanted to live in London,” she said, “it’s been a dream for me since I was seventeen. I’m thirty-two now and I’ve still never lived there, so I think it’s time.”
Like most people, she wants to move to London because she wants to be in the middle of it all; she hopes her life will take on a new and more vibrant sheen in the big city. She wants to experience the World as it is happening, brush up against all its textures, and be pulled out of her melancholy, introspective ways. She had been married, for seven years, but now that’s finished and she needs a new start.
On Friday, I was chatting with a Scottish guy, in another bar a little further up the street. We got onto talking about how he came to Oxford, and he told me that he lived before in London. He said he used to like it, when he first lived there, but over the years the crime and violence wore him down. He lived in Hackney, right near Central station, with is wife and two kids. They liked their life - there was always something going on - but there were practical problems. His car would get broken into ever couple of months, until, eventually, he learnt to simply leave it unlocked, as other local residents did. At night, there were usually crack addicts selling their bodies along the pavement out the front of his house: but that was a simple as a blunt refusal, and not his business. But then one afternoon, just after school had finished for the day, he was walking through London Fields with his kids. They came upon frantic scene, police holding people back, a teenager stabbed in the neck and bleeding to death. Some kind of gang fight in the park. “The blood was flowing out of him and literally into the gutter,” he told me, “it was a river of blood.”
So they left London.
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