Moving to London: meal deals, mortality and the Pretpocalypse
By: Matt Tidby
Tags: Life, London, Travel

Moving to the capital is a post-education must for many people. Confused suburbanite Matt Tidby writes about the perils and pleasures of London living.

“I’m thinking about the apocalypse a lot.” Photo: Jared Tarbell / Flickr.

A couple of weeks ago, I moved to London for the first time, to do a three month internship. I’d never spent more than a handful of days around so many people before, and in my self-assigned role as a lost suburbanite, it has been a quick and ever-expanding lesson, in pretty much everything, to drop in on the lives of these London people.

When eight million people live on top of each other, they have to keep moving otherwise their collective London wisdom has it that they’ll just form neat, static piles in the street and gather dust. Getting about is of paramount importance to the London people. They run up and down devices that were designed to make stairs faster and easier. They fling themselves through closing Tube doors, just to be at work/the pub/home a whole minute earlier. The train doors bump and beep with automatic delight — they’ve been whittling off bits of Londoner for some time now, building an army of patchwork creatures for when the machines rise up and take control.

Food is also a big thing in this city. I’m a notoriously fussy eater; as a child, I would freak out if vegetables came near any of the other constituent parts of a meal (I grew up in Hampshire, I had to find something to push against) and I still enter a state of acute anxiety when in unknown gastronomic environs.

So far, London has not helped me to relax in this regard. Pret A Manger are so omnipresent that I have begun to find them sinister; it feels like they’ve deliberately seeded themselves into the infrastructure of the city in order to seize executive power after the apocalypse. Many salads here involve gherkins, even though: a) they taste of gherkin, b) they’re called gherkins. There are even feeding rituals; the food in Itsu magically becomes affordable at 7.30pm, leading to a quite remarkable perfect storm of brogues and media beards that sweeps in and empties the shelves in a five minute frenzy. All that was missing was an Attenborough commentary; it was comically jarring to see a ritual as restrained as queuing appear so animistic. It made me feel somewhat incongruous for continuing to have faith in Tesco meal deals, but also kind of victorious too.

As is probably obvious, I’m thinking about the apocalypse a lot. Living in parallel with so much mortality encourages dystopian thought. I believe the benefit of the urban experience is the opportunity to see us for what we are when we put our minds to it: noble, well-intentioned, striving little ants, building and pushing, drinking and stumbling, mute in carriages and loud when loved — but still, essentially, good.

Nevertheless, urban isolation promotes the sense of the morose mass, the meaninglessness of the crowd — stoic units walking through underground tunnels, looking down, off to make worthless money and precious small talk. When I see dystopia, my reaction is to dream of utopia — the notion of collectivising the land and setting the souls of London free suddenly becomes a delightful, Elysian alternative to the sweat fugs of prime-time central line travel.

But people live in cities, and love them and aspire to them, and always have done; 14th-century bodies found by the recent Crossrail excavations have been attributed to every corner of the UK. If we were meant to live in balanced, dissipated communes, then history would not be the tale of great cities, the people in them and the things they did or didn’t do.

The infectiously positive thing about London, despite the dislocation, the fear and the Prets, is an overwhelming sense of momentum — people here ride the mortal coil like a helter-skelter, ravenously consuming experience, good and bad, as they go. When reality intercedes, whether through a predictable salad or a delayed train, they moan for 30 seconds or 140 characters and then they move on, keep spinning and change at Finsbury Park. It’s confusing and compulsive in equal measure, and if I ever go native, I’ll be on the first train to Cornwall.