A SEA OF THINGS I DON’T LIKE VERY MUCH

Sometimes I have to go to London. Now, if you were to draw a graph of the most expensive places to be (x axis) and the least likeable (y), London would absolutely be disappearing off the top right corner.

Old news I know. I witter about it every time I come here, but today’s journey involved broken escalators, delayed trains, standing-room only, armpits, running from Paddington to Baker Street like a loon, and being squished unpleasantly by the doors of the tube.

Worse still, after all that, you get there and you’re in London. It’s like someone’s charged you £300 to use the toilet, insisted you pay it in coins, and then when you get there they show you to a portaloo.

I shouldn’t really compare this gigantic sparkling city to a toilet. That does seem rude, and I can only apologise if you’re a Londoner, or you absolutely love the place. I don’t mean to get scatalogical - it’s just that the things I like about London are to me like gleaming islands of a wonder (the National Gallery, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London, the indomitable spirit of the people) in a sea of things I don’t like very much, and my opinion (and it is only an opinion) is - I’d rather be working in Oxford.

It’s a busy day too. I’m bewildered by how much I have to do and what comes first. It’s as though the rush and bustle of the place is seeping out into the air, stressing everybody out. Well not everybody…

“So do you think we actually went to the moon?” asked Andy, twinkling in the corner.

A debate followed. I decided early on to keep quiet; I know where those things end, and I was staying out of it. Sure enough, the subtleties turned into philosophical questions, until somebody said…

“Well it’s only history if it happened.”

At which point I piped in with, “That is profound!” - which it is. I had wanted to go on about how you can see the tracks on the lunar surface, view the lander through a telescope, listen to interviews of corroborating testimony, and blow apart almost every single argument about wobbling flags, camera angles and a starless backdrop. But I didn’t.

It’s only history if it happened. It’s profound because history is both the thing that happened and the way we interpret it. It’s the record of a thing; a view of a real event, and the event itself. Like the moon landings. We call them both history, even when the view is different to the reality.

I suppose London is foggy streets and a doff of the cap then, if you want it to be. Cheeky chappies Dick-Van-Dyking around every lamplit corner if you want to believe it. Except it isn’t. It’s a sea with very few glistening islands, and only a memory of all that wonder from film and literature and yes, history.

I looked out of the window at the grey sky above the shadowed brick and glass. I can’t wait to get home, I thought.