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Entry tags:
edges
I'm sitting in the back garden, in the sunshine, with a straw hat on. I have a cold drink and the internet and a cushion to sit on. My stereo is playing The Girl With The Sun In Her Head from just inside the dining room. I'm surrounded by dandelions and some kind of blue flower that just appeared suddenly, in clumps, one day. Thistles and brambles as well, but – shrug.
And what am I doing? I'm missing London. Silly.
When I go back to London these days it all looks different. I come off the Oxford Tube into Victoria station and I'm struck by how big and how busy everything is. The huge indoor space full of crowds and a hundred things to pay attention to. It's always been like that, but the last couple of visits I found myself liking it. It was exciting, the way it was when I was a tourist coming from Ireland. Not a place to rush through with shoulders tensed, in a hurry somewhere, irritated by the crowd, worrying that there'd be a huge queue at the cash machine. When I lived in London I was carrying my obligations around with me. Now it's somewhere I go to play. No wonder I miss it.
Going on through the tunnels to catch my tube, last time I was back there, I was moving at half the speed of everyone else. People dashed and jostled and I just strolled along, early to meet![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ultraruby and dr_f_dellamorte and taking my time, in a calm little bubble of East Oxford crusty peaced-outness.
Moving out of London has slowed me down. That's fine. It's nice not to feel like you're hanging on by your fingernails. Or like you've got stimulus fatigue and alcohol poisoning from going to films and gigs and stuff every single night and need to spend a week by yourself in a plain white room eating plain white rice. But it does give me a funny indistinct feeling of having lost my edge. I don't hear about new stuff as much as I did, unless I make a conscious effort – music, films, even news.
It's all to do with the tube. If you take the tube every day, you see posters for movies or events or music, even if you aren't taking them in with your fully conscious mind. You buy the paper to occupy your hour-long commute. You read other people's newspaper headlines too. You see what books people are reading (and if you're in a carriage where every bugger is reading The Da Vinci Code, you get depressed, but never mind). All of it gives you a feeling of being in a place where Stuff happens, lots of it, so much Stuff you can't possibly take it all in. If you've got the energy, that feels really good.
(Pause to shoo an insect off my keyboard. That's better.)
Later we were atdr_f_dellamorte's house in Hendon, with fabulous 70s movie posters all over the walls (Don't mess aroun' with Foxy Brown! She's the meanest chick in town!). He kept putting on music like I'd never heard before and I kept going "oh mygod what is that? I must have that," like the first time I ever went to a goth-alternative-indie-rock club (in Dublin it had to be all those things at once). I was talking to Gemma about edges and the loss of them, and I found myself saying that I'd spent four years in London stuffing ideas and experiences into my head, often with little time to do anything else. But in Oxford I have the breathing space to consolidate that. I can let the ideas sink down in my mind and become compost out of which things will sprout in time.
And what am I doing? I'm missing London. Silly.
When I go back to London these days it all looks different. I come off the Oxford Tube into Victoria station and I'm struck by how big and how busy everything is. The huge indoor space full of crowds and a hundred things to pay attention to. It's always been like that, but the last couple of visits I found myself liking it. It was exciting, the way it was when I was a tourist coming from Ireland. Not a place to rush through with shoulders tensed, in a hurry somewhere, irritated by the crowd, worrying that there'd be a huge queue at the cash machine. When I lived in London I was carrying my obligations around with me. Now it's somewhere I go to play. No wonder I miss it.
Going on through the tunnels to catch my tube, last time I was back there, I was moving at half the speed of everyone else. People dashed and jostled and I just strolled along, early to meet
ultraruby and dr_f_dellamorte and taking my time, in a calm little bubble of East Oxford crusty peaced-outness. Moving out of London has slowed me down. That's fine. It's nice not to feel like you're hanging on by your fingernails. Or like you've got stimulus fatigue and alcohol poisoning from going to films and gigs and stuff every single night and need to spend a week by yourself in a plain white room eating plain white rice. But it does give me a funny indistinct feeling of having lost my edge. I don't hear about new stuff as much as I did, unless I make a conscious effort – music, films, even news.
It's all to do with the tube. If you take the tube every day, you see posters for movies or events or music, even if you aren't taking them in with your fully conscious mind. You buy the paper to occupy your hour-long commute. You read other people's newspaper headlines too. You see what books people are reading (and if you're in a carriage where every bugger is reading The Da Vinci Code, you get depressed, but never mind). All of it gives you a feeling of being in a place where Stuff happens, lots of it, so much Stuff you can't possibly take it all in. If you've got the energy, that feels really good.
(Pause to shoo an insect off my keyboard. That's better.)
Later we were at
dr_f_dellamorte's house in Hendon, with fabulous 70s movie posters all over the walls (Don't mess aroun' with Foxy Brown! She's the meanest chick in town!). He kept putting on music like I'd never heard before and I kept going "oh mygod what is that? I must have that," like the first time I ever went to a goth-alternative-indie-rock club (in Dublin it had to be all those things at once). I was talking to Gemma about edges and the loss of them, and I found myself saying that I'd spent four years in London stuffing ideas and experiences into my head, often with little time to do anything else. But in Oxford I have the breathing space to consolidate that. I can let the ideas sink down in my mind and become compost out of which things will sprout in time.
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Great. Just what my guilty conscience needed: an ally...
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As if I wasn't already envious. :-) I love Manchester and the boy will have my head if I say anything good about London, but I still feel isolated here and while of course this is probably more due to me moving six time zones away, I now wonder if there isn't something to your theory as well. My friends in London, as well as all knowing each other, have enviable public transportation! With history and mythology and my friends (well, LJ friends anyway) walking between tube stations just because they feel like it! And now you tell me that this is why they know more things and do more things than me as well? Gah! So envious. :-)
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I think that's a good thing -- at least, I know it's a good thing for me, and I think it could be seen as a positive thing by other people. I'd like to have fewer rivers of information flowing through my head, and make more conscious effort to go out and find the good stuff when I'm in a stuff-receptive mood, rather than just thinking "Oh god YET ANOTHER folksy singer-songwriter/film about gay cowboys/whatever" and feeling jaded and fed up with the morass of mediocrity all the time. I suppose it's sort of part of the whole mindfulness thing that I'm slowly trying to train my brain into (though in danger of boring other people to death long before I get there).
The downside, I guess, is that when I do find something good, everybody else will already have heard of it; but I think I can live with being square. 8-)
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I don't even know how to talk about London any more; it's so much a part of who I am that I can't step outside of it to observe the relationship. Still I'm only involved in a very small way, in a speck of dust sort of way, and that's how I like it.
I don't think it's cities or spaces that make people cool, I think it's the other way round. You take your culture with you.
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Though I suspect that once the effects of reading this post have worn off, I'll decide I want to stay separated (well, divorced), but visit more often... :-)
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I firmly believe that one's love/hate of a city is entirely determined by the amount of obligations you have and schedules you have to keep when you live there. When you have to get up every morning at the same time, go to the same place, it gets so monotonous. Things you actually _want to_ do don't really get a look in, and you're too tired to make time for them after another god damn work day. I always wish I'd got up a bit earlier just so I could sit and chill on a bench Patrick Kavanagh style, and feed the swans, and laugh at the ducks, and dote over the moorhens. :)
Same way as I really miss Paris now, but when I had that shit job there I couldn't wait to get away from the place. The job gave me a bad attitude to it too..
Oh well, enough rambling, time for work :/
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