London Calling

Quote: Ex-English cricketer in a spot interview, on being asked for his views on assisted suicide: “I think people should do their own thing.”

So I’ve been living it up the English way for a month and a half or so, but have lots of traveling in the pipeline, so I thought it might be a nice time to jot down a story and a few thoughts on London.

View from my balcony as Winter steals in

 First of all, I’ve finished up my brief spell of working, which has been quite nice. I had to finish due to all this travel I have planned. (I’m off to Paris for a week on the 16th and then I’m spending some time on the ski slopes with Gab, Nic and co. in the French Alps for Christmas.) Also, I’d earned about as much as I wanted to (enough to make the trip possible) and I was damned if I was going to let my travel job get in the way of my traveling. (Most significantly, the Ashes began, with play starting daily at midnight.)

In addition to all this, I didn’t like the blokes running the shop. I got on very well with everyone I was actually working with in a day to day sense, as well as the actual customers (“Really? Well, you speak excellent English for an Australian”), but with the upper management, so to speak, there were some issues. First of all, I didn’t like them paying next to nothing and then treating their workers as if it was a privilege to be working there. I was told when I arrived that I’d be paid six pounds an hour initially, which would go up if I made it past a ‘trial period’ (of indeterminate length). However, on my first day, it became apparent that this was not the case. The three guys that had been working the longest - at least two years apiece - were all earning the same minimum wage, despite two of them now playing managerial roles. Not a good start.

Secondly, there was a petty, passive aggressive stance taken by these upper managers. Criticisms would not come directly from them, unless they were the sort of wishy-washy things that there is no reasonable response to. I remember one occasion when I had asked the owner, who had just entered the shop, if there was anything in the van to be brought in. He responded that I should show some initiative. Not being sure whether that answer was in the positive or not, I asked again, “so, does that mean there is something in the van?”

A message was passed on (via several links) to me the next day that I should show more respect.

Fundamentally, there was a clash of philosophies (and egos). The workplaces where I’ve done best in are the ones that take as starting points that everyone is equal, albeit within a hierarchy, and that the guiding principle is that there is a job of work to be done and everyone will get in and do it (together). I am unaccustomed to (and apparently unwilling to acclimatise to) workplaces where there is a class system and one player can criticise without being criticised.

I could go on, but you get the point. I made a series of arrogant gaffes, some intentional and some simply stupid (said unthinkingly to the manager upon a sudden, humorous realisation, “you know, on hour, I’m earning less than a quarter of what I was in my last job?”) all of which resulted in my services no longer being required.

Not that I intended to be still working by now, but it’s like the break-up game; I would have preferred to have got in first and done it on my terms.

Oh well. I regret nothing. And the beef bourgignon, followed by pears poached in red-wine, that Mark and I had for dinner tonight was delicious.

London: watchful

More importantly, London: I love it and I intend to live and work here properly (as a professional) at some point. There’s a great energy here that’s complex and understated. I said a few months ago that Berlin promotes itself. Well London doesn’t and it never has. No-one says how great London is the way they do Paris, Barcelona, New York, etc. They say the weather’s rubbish and people hate each other (which is true).

The reason for this is that London has never had to. For a huge period of time, London was the centre of world power. It was both unassailable as an Empire and isolated geographically. A famous English headline once read ‘FOG IN CHANNEL  - CONTINENT CUT OFF’, which says a lot. It also speaks a lot about the English Dream - to be resplendently aloof (read isolated and unassailable) as a person, which is a dream I’m pretty taken in by, even if I see the pitfalls.

My teeth were always sensitive to the cold

The second wonderful thing about being here, which I don’t think you can quite get anywhere but London, is connecting to the language. It’s one of the things I like most about my heritage and, in my opinion (and also, I’ll admit, Jeremy Paxman’s), the great gift of England to the world. This country, historically at least, doesn’t boast many visual artists or great composers, but from Shakespeare to Gervais, it does boast wordsmiths. Language is so crucial. It’s how we define ourselves and explain, like, instantly which community we belong to and where we fit in that community. That's true everywhere, of course, but in London, this tapestry of accents, intonations and syntactical showmanship is alive and wriggling.

Oh, and I have a football team. Turns out I support Tottenham.

I think I’ll come back after the wedding in India, and I might even come back after the wedding in April. When it will be warmer.

Best to all,

Michael