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TIRED OF LIVING…? Pt. 2 August 14, 2023

Posted by markswill in Uncategorized.
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My last scrawl attracted some accusations of undue negativity about Britain’s glittering metropolis which I now feel duty-bound to justify, if not dismiss as lazy generalisation.

Firstly I should say that I was born in London, although didn’t live there as what passes for an adult until the mid-60s but that was when it was furiously swinging and being lucky enough to share a flat above Soho’s legendary 2i’s coffee bar with a childhood friend who later became the Nice’s bass player, I enjoyed much of its then vibrant music scene, strong lager, sexual freedom and barmy fashions.

A little later I moved to Islington with my first proper girlfriend, Philly – still a good friend, amazingly enough – and a stripped-down, hotted-up Triumph Daytona where we conveniently lived two doors down from two well-off yanks who’d come here to buy brand new BSA Firebirds and Triumph Bonnevilles respectively. Oh what fun we had, especially on Saturday afternoons taking different routes to Earls Court tube station where a ticket bought from the machine proved that the winner was first back to Belitha Villas.

Philly worked for Rita Jarvis, also still a dear friend, the UK distributor for the Leacock-Pennebaker films, most notably the seminal Dylan doc, Don’t Look Back so I often found myself lugging heavy metal film canisters to various railways stations destined for student film societies, and attending late night screenings where I could park my ‘bike outside, as indeed one could do almost anywhere in town and smoke fags and snog in the back rows.

I don’t want to get too rose-tinted about those days, for as I moved into the underground press or – more by happenstance than any qualification for the role of music editor – a rude awakening to the realities of police raids and political pressure on printers and distributors – e.g. the infamous Oz trial – cultivated an healthy scepticism of authority which remains proudly intact. A little later after  the alternative society we were naively trying to create fell apart, I applied the ‘you-can-do-anything-if-you-try-hard-enough’ mentality it had instilled in me and launched my first, and then my second, ‘bike mag whilst somehow simultaneously being a contracted freelance rock journalist, but London was already changing. Parking meters, one way streets, stop-and-search were just some irritating symptoms of that change, but we could still ride loud motorcycles through the late night streets and get pissed at Dingwalls Dance Hall, or digest greasy bacon sarnies by Chelsea Bridge, and with our offices located in the then still quite boho Fitzrovia, Friday nights at the One-Tun or the Marquis of Granby before lashing off for burgers at the Hard Rock or the Tubes playing Hammy Odeon were all taken for granted.

And I could soon afford cars, too, a succession of Alfas and a Mazda pick-up to carry our enduro ‘bikes to Wales and beyond, which, yet again, I could park outside my agreeably cheap Peabody flat courtesy of an inexpensive council permit.

And such freedom of movement, affordable rents, cinemas and art galleries etcetera extended way into the ‘80s and ‘90s, albeit with curbs stealthily encroaching but as recently as the mid-noughties you could still drive a car down to Fitzrovia from Kentish Town of an evening, park free and enjoy a night in Soho, or chain up your ‘bike at Paddington Station and hop a train down to Wales pretty confident that it’d still be there upon your return.

My last blog bemoaned that all of that is gone now and that for me anyway, have perforce deterred me from ‘biking or driving around a town where caution, safety, little used cycle lanes and no-go rat-runs have become the watchwords by which Londoners must now abide and which we’re relentlessly bombarded with over tube and bus P.A. Systems. This Nanny State-ism, and its cost to council-tax payers and visitors alike, have for me rendered a once-beloved hometown an expensive chore to negotiate and I find myself sharing the perpetual frowns of its put-upon denizens whenever I’m there. Not that there aren’t pleasures still to be had – enduring friendships paramount amongst them – but as some of those friends are now being priced-out of, or turned-off by living there, they too are leaving it behind to well-healed tourists, bankers and wankers whose idea of what this once-great capital city means is a grubby, expensive, obstacle-ridden pastiche of what it once was… But even so, I am not quite tired of life!

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TIRED OF LIVING…? August 11, 2023

Posted by markswill in Uncategorized.
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11 comments

A few of my loyal and weary readers may know that the above headline reprises the name of Pete Mustill and the late, lamented Angus Wood’s 1980s band, whose sole and brilliant single, You’ve Got To Kiss A Lots of Frogs I actually produced and released to commemorate (?) the engagement of the then Prince Chuck and poor darling Diana. However rather than dwell on its singular lack of chart success – the BBC refused to play it on grounds of sedition! – it also refers, albeit obliquely, to Samuel Johnson’s dictum, ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’

And although I visit the metropolis as often as possible as an antidote to the relative isolation and cultural barrenness of rural life, my most recent stay there proved less than uplifting. True, in the space of four days I managed to cram in three films (Paris Memories by far the best), some art, a couple of decent walks, a few meals and cuppas with friends, the latter almost inevitably taken up with others’ health matters, some of them depressing. But often enjoyable although that all was, what struck me most about my brief sojourn is how almost unliveable the capital has now become.

Although I can’t drive or ride there any longer as there’s nowhere affordable to park and 20mph speeds limits, barely used cycle lanes and restricted traffic zones rigidly enforced by CCT and their concomitant hefty fines make driving and motorcycling a frustrating ordeal, spine-jarring bus rides show that like the Welsh Marches, council budget cuts have rendered potholes a danger to the cyclists mayor Sadiq Khan is insisting his citizens all become, a lack of funding exacerbated by the £200million that the new ULEZ scheme is costing which threatens to bankrupt many small businesses and carers. It also means that cyclists, e-scooter and indeed ‘bikers and motorists swerving to avoid the worst surface degradations are a menace to those, like me, trying to cross busy roads, or oncoming traffic – I saw one such nasty accident on a wet evening in Camden. And sharing public transport with Pot Noodle, crisp-munch hordes shouting into their phones on buses, trains and tubes that haven’t been cancelled or re-routed is a miserable lottery

I also noticed the overflowing litter bins and randomly discarded rubbish that now blight the pavements and streets, again due to budget cuts, which doubtless dismays the many tourists on whom the entertainment and hospitality industries now largely rely. This urban landscape was further despoilt by boarded-up shops, unfinished street repairs and decaying buildings that almost reminded me of my very early childhood when London was still suffering the architectural consequences of the Blitz.

But it wasn’t just the optics, there was a kind of barely contained resentment, even fear in the air, a mood of public dissatisfaction with, well, almost everything about life in the city where the cost of living crisis has now, let’s face it, become permanent, 20 viewings take place for each rental vacancy despite their soaring prices, computerised tills in galleries and cinemas don’t work properly, where cashiers have been replaced by us customers obliged to use cranky self-service tills, where staff in cafes and restaurants abruptly ask – no, tell – you to move on once you’ve finished your drinks, where a pint of bitter now costs almost six quid and a single scoop of ice cream, my one remaining guilty pleasure, is four quid. Cyclists shout at you crossing the road at traffic lights they’ve ignored, teenagers talk loudly into their ear-buds as they wait in cinema queues and a growing incidence of aggressive beggars demand money to buy food or, more likely, booze and fags. (Actually, in recent visits I’ve started giving money to genuine-looking beggars who increasingly seem to be young and despairing).

I’m well aware that my legion of detractors will view the aforegoing as the worthless moaning of a fairly privileged oldie who, like all previous generations of oldies, finds change unsettling, especially as now driven by often bewildering and flawed technology, and hankers after the allegedly ‘good old days’ when things seemed simpler and thus more fathomable. However what is clearly different and more worrisome now is that our population is expanding hugely without there being the infrastructure to adequately support it at a cost that’s bearable to the country and the city state.

So do I want to live in London again, even part-time which I was lucky enough to do for several decades? Well not really, for as Samuel Johnson also said, ‘Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.’

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