London is terrible. It’s literally the worst place in the world, and I’m not using “literally” in that awful way people in London use it when they talk about how they “literally need a supersize basement” or they “literally will die if they don’t have a £10 coffee”. (London people are awful.) I mean it in the original sense of the word – there is literally nowhere in the world worse than London. Not South Sudan, not Yemen. Not even New Jersey. London. The worst. Literally.
After decades of British newspapers being notoriously London-centric, readers may have been somewhat surprised to notice a new trend: that of journalists writing about how inexpressibly awful the capital is. So awful, in fact, they are now doing the heretofore absolutely unthinkable and moving out of London.
Is there a world outside London? This has yet to be verified. Personally, I always imagined that beyond the M25 was nothing but apocalyptic wastelands populated only by burning pieces of brush and sunken-eyed zombies wandering around and wailing most pitifully “MUST FIND A WAITROSE”. But perhaps I was wrong. For now it is a rare day when a newspaper doesn’t contain a bit of London-bashing, with a journalist declaring the city to be dead. And the proof of this is that they are leaving it.
Well, I never encountered a trend I didn’t like (except dropped-crotch trousers, obviously). So as soon as I realised this was a thing – journalists writing about how they have decided to move to such exotic and bucolic environs as Bath, Birmingham, Brighton, even Los Angeles, places where they famously give away five-storey houses in exchange for a bucket of apples and a pint of ale (countryside folk are so real) – I knew I had to get on board at once.
I started to look around and I realised, you know what? London really is dead. You can go for months in the city without seeing anyone other than a Russian billionaire or Charles Saatchi. No wonder so many people I know are leaving London: and the fact that they’re all in their 30s, starting to have children and therefore wanting bigger houses and more school options, and happen to have amazingly flexible jobs that allow them to live where they want, is a mere coincidence.
I also looked at my local high street, where I used to see such a pleasing ethnically mixed selection of shops: the Greek shop that sold olives, the Indian shop that sold spices, the Spanish shop that sold cheese. Obviously I never shopped at any of them – there’s a Waitrose up the road – but it was always good to know they were there.
But then the other day I noticed that the olive shop had shut down and was being replaced with a Tesco Metro. So convenient, but ugh: nightmare. I knew at once it was time to move. What happened to the olive man? I don’t know. I was too busy booking my removal van and Googling “Cath Kidston store – in Oxford?” to check on his whereabouts. That’s not important. The point is, the process had begun.
And here’s the worst thing about London: it’s not even original! American journalists have been writing these pieces about how they’re moving out of New York – and wow, isn’t that amazing, and boy, that says so much about the city, really – for absolute yonks. So much so that it’s a genre in itself.
Joan Didion inadvertently kickstarted the cliche with Goodbye to All That, published in 1967; and ever since American writers, including Andrew Sullivan –who moved all the way back to the wilds of Washington DC) – have written state-of-New-York essays about how their experience of the city is everyone’s experience, and because they hated Manhattan then so should everyone else.
In fact, you can even buy a book of collected essays on the subject in which 28 – 28! – writers will tell you at length about why they decided to move out of New York. True, some of us had long thought that listening to other people’s reasons for moving was about as boring as listening to other people recount their dreams, and only marginally more interesting than listening to other people’s drug stories. But that is to misunderstand this genre in which the specifically personal is elevated to the urgently universal.
Indeed, that genre has become so overdone that it’s become even more specific, with journalists exercising their thesauruses over articles about why they’re leaving New York for Los Angeles. Except things move so quickly in the US that even this has now been satirised as a terrible cliche, and Ann Friedman wrote a parody of such a piece in the Los Angeles Times in May. As chance would have it, only two years ago Friedman herself wrote a (non-parody) piece about why she left New York. But then, as we’ve already established, it’s hard to find a writer in America who hasn’t written about that.
So there we are. London: overpriced, overcrowded, no good olive shops, and not even original. And journalists: very fond of writing about why they’re moving. No wonder everything’s dead. Anyway, you will all be happy to know that, apropos Olivegate, I have definitely decided to leave London – so if anyone wants me, I’ll be roughing it out in the wilds of Hampstead. Pray for me.