Recompression Sickness - Returning to London

After being away from London for six months one always expects, completely unrealistically, that enormous amounts of things will have changed. In many ways, there have been some pretty seismic alterations to London and the country as a whole. However much of it is still hidden out of sight, while some of its changes are now painfully and plainly visible. According to Facebook there also seems to be some sort of engagement epidemic happening that must be down to some form of collective hysteria. I hope it isn't contagious as I have absolutely no imminent plans to enter into such a foolish arrangement. Life is actually bloody long so please for God's sake make sure you know what you're getting yourself into chaps.

Aside from all the engagement nonsense not that much has really changed. London is still, and always has been a city that ceaselessly bristles with the unflinching energy of commerce. I was swiftly reminded of this as I went for a walk on Friday morning in the Democratic People's Republic of Kensington and Chelsea. For you US readers, the most conservative constituency (district) in the UK just voted in a socialist representative in our parliament. It was about as likely to happen as Mississippi electing Bernie Sanders as their Senator. But it happened and it's pretty hilarious.

In spite of the new regime, very little had changed. The London air was pleasingly cool and the morning light was as gloriously golden as a day can be here. Yet even in this relatively tranquil parts, the city is still doused with an an aura of stress. Everywhere I wandered, office workers strafed and paced with a kind of frenzied gusto that would get you stopped by the police in NOLA. Out of habit, I made eye contact with a passing stranger and said 'Good Morning'. I was met with a pinched facial expression that was a curious mixture of 'get the fuck away from me' and 'are you handicapped?'.

Despite the beauty of the morning light, cool breezes and verdant streets, London's frenetic energy quickly gifted me a familiar and unwelcome sweat. After just fifteen minutes of exposure to London and I was beginning to perspire like a German trying to tell a joke. I recognised this as a sort of Recompression Sickness and felt that I needed some more time here to really set myself straight. By the time I'd walked to meet my father for breakfast I had a tension headache. The last time I had one was before I left my job in November.

By the end of my first full day back, my time in New Orleans was beginning to feel like a wonderful, lucid dream. I missed her heat and the small pleasantries of her friendly inhabitants. London felt frosty, and ever so slightly depressed. Although it was Friday which likely meant that most of the people I was passing were either hung over or, more likely, still drunk. Which isn't much of a surprise. I'd barely returned and the city was very actively driving me towards drink. Not that I need a great deal of persuasion at the best of times.

Other things about Chelsea also remained as eternal as ever. In cafes everywhere there were fleets of oleaginous old men lurking in pastel coloured suits, smoking cigarillos, sipping microscopic coffees and generally looking languorous. Often they would be wearing dark glasses and braying Italian, French or a more exotic tongue down an iPhone or down the throat of a girl so nubile and decorous that I can only assume that that they were a mistress, a prostitute or both. In fact after 9 am, the borough of Kensington and Chelsea seemed principally to consist of grey haired men in loafers boisterously conducting affairs.

Aside from that there was the occasional housewife in £800 leggings walking something that could be a dog or just a very well appointed rat. Even this activity seems to require more hours put into their appearance than the painters of the Sistine Chapel required for Michelangelo's Frescoes. Incidentally I saw a man walking a goat at a bar in NOLA once. I stared blankly at it for some time until he said 'Yes, it is a goat.' The goat then made a strange gurgling noise and they went merrily on their way together.

Aside from well cologned leches and lechees, there were enormous numbers of people who were actively involved in either the decoration, construction, cleaning and refurbishment of homes. In fact I'm almost certain that there are more people working on homes in Chelsea during the day then there are actual residents in the borough. Especially as thy're all shuffling about trying to shag each other.

I missed NOLA's 'I don't give a fuck' approach to life considerably and by lunch time I remembered almost all of the reasons why I left this city in the first place. There certainly still were some things I did miss about London that I never thought I'd be glad for. Bank card security for one. How a country that landed men on the moon hasn't even started widely using chip and pin for cards is beyond me. At the current rate of adoption I'll be able to make a contactless payment in 2025.

For all the strikes, delays and drunken arseholes, London's mass transit is also generally quite clean and reliable. NOLA's is so dysfunctional and slow that in six months I haven't used a bus or the streetcar once. I plan to take the streetcar one day but more as a diverting tourist attraction and perhaps some fodder for an article. Once should never use it to get from A to B, especially if you need to get to B on time.

London also does murder, or lack thereof, pretty well too. To put it in perspective, at current trends, New Orleans has a murder rate of 44 deaths per 100,000. London's is 3 per 100,000. That means I'm about fifteen times less likely to get murdered here than back in NOLA, which is really shit, to say the least. It's the highest murder rate in America and puts it on par with Kingston, Jamaica. Chicago actually beats us in shootings per 100,000 but they are shite at aiming apparently because only one in five shootings there are lethal. NOLA is more like one in three. I'm not sure if that's a thing we should be very proud about or not.

I have also missed the relentless politeness of the British people. They may not be the friendliest on earth (especially here) but you'll never hear more attempts to say 'sorry' in a shorter amount of time than when a Brit is accidentally nudged by a stranger on The Tube. For US readers, being nudged on The Tube is quite different to what you'd imagine it to be- The Tube is what we call a Subway or Metro here.

Occasionally the British forget their manners

London is also gifted with an extraordinary amount of free green public spaces. Despite its massive population it's one of the least densely populated cities in the world. Every park, crescent and square is almost certain to consist of the most singular and breathtaking beauty. Except in winter and a good chunk of Autumn, of course. NOLA, conversely, is America's least forested city. Which is a great shame because the species of flora and fauna that do grow there once planted are some of the finest on earth.

Once I had restored air to my bicycle tyres I was also reminded what it's like to cycle in a city that isn't like driving on the surface of the moon. London's roads are almost entirely free of major blemishes. NOLA's cycling infrastructure is definitely more in the 'wishful thinking' camp. There is only one single separate cycle way on a main road in NOLA and I am not exaggerating when I say that it lasts no more than twenty feet at most. There is one noticeably smooth road called Napoleon Avenue which has recently been given a face lift. It took, and this is not an exaggeration either, eight years to complete. On a stretch of road no more than three miles long. And they somehow managed to destroy the foundations of a number of historic homes in the process, on both sides of the street no less.

When NOLA gives you lemons, put beer in it

It's this kind of willful incompetence that makes New Orleans so delightfully human though and I wouldn't have it any other way. Rather than being a source of shame it's just accepted as a general source of amusement that any large scale infrastructure project in NOLA will be extremely delayed, hugely over budget or simply won't materialise. It took London less time to build The Shard, the tallest building in Europe, than it took NOLA to re-pave a three mile road and add a slightly better storm drain and no one really batted an eyelid.

Despite my current au fait attitude to London, it will always be a city that belongs to me. Glorying in her luxuriously smooth roads on Celine (my bike) there isn't a single nook or cranny that doesn't seem to hold a treasured memory. Often from when I was a teenager with friends engaging in deviant activities that generally involved making general nuisances of ourselves. I still feel like I could navigate through her streets blindfolded having cycled, staggered, hobbled and jogged through so many of them. And yet there's always more to discover here. After 24 years living here I still somehow stumble into areas the size of The Vatican that are alien to me. It's a place that defies proportion and yet, doesn't have the completely overbearing quality that a city like New York or Hong King bestows upon you.

I suppose that is the best and worst thing about this place. It's just so bloody big. I could fly to Marrakesh faster than the time it takes me to get to some of my friend's places. It's immensely frustrating but also part of this city's extraordinary appeal. It's also a place that keeps one foot deeply rooted in the past while also continually evolving at break neck speed. There are currently four hundred and fifty five skyscrapers either being built or planned in this city. It's a number that I simply can't quite wrap my head around. Then again, this is a city that I can't quite wrap my head around either. No one person can.

There are also some similarities between the two that I find hard to digest. Like NOLA, London is a city with rampant inequality between rich and poor. An issue that was highlighted by a recent fire in a tower block used for social housing. Some one hundred lives were lost in the Grenfell Tower because a shoddy refurbishment used a cheap, flammable material to coat the building and no sprinklers were installed. The sheer scale of destruction could only really be comprehended once I laid eyed on it myself. A vast, charred monolith standing like a tombstone in one of the richest areas in the world. At night there was something even more profoundly eerie about her lifeless shadow set against the twinkling, animated lights of her immediate neighbours.

NOLA also suffers from a galling level of inequality that's hard wired into its DNA. Although it's an economic disparity that falls mostly along racial lines. But instead of towers burning people alive, poverty leads to an extremely high likelihood of being shot, dying slowly from diseases related to poor diet or not receiving appropriate medical care because you can't afford it. In many ways it is so much more fucked up than London could ever be. But I still love it there and I'm proud to call it home in spite of its deep, rankling flaws.

In any event, it's a great pleasure to be back here and to see my friends and family again. It's ultimately people that make a place and I have a goodly number of them that I love very dearly here. Life is infinitely richer for their presence in it and I'm so deeply thankful and grateful to have them. Having a very small family, I've always seen friends as an surrogate extension of my own and love many of them as dearly.

If you're still reading by this point then firstly, well done, I know this is a long article but also thank you for being there for me. Thank you for always supporting my slightly barmy endeavours. Thank you for being part of so many wonderful memories. Thank you for still accepting that farting loudly in public still has its merits as a form of humour. And thank you for just generally putting up with me. It's apprecaited and hasn't gone unnoticed. I'm looking forward to a fantastic summer together (unless you're in the US, in which case, see you in September).