© Katherine De Vere All Rights Reserved
In England, specifically London, everyone lives in a cupboard. Space is expensive, so only the wealthy have space – or the homeless. Of course, the homeless have all the space in the world, only no place to call home.
The advantages of renting a cupboard are, that you spend most of your time out of the cupboard, trying to avoid returning to the cupboard and/or reorganising the cupboard to try to make space for your actual limbs. What’s next? Will we be slumped over ropes AKA Dickensian doss-houses?
Another thing I’ve noticed about London, aside from the woeful weather, is that Londoners ignore each other at an Olympic level. Even if you’re cheek-by-jowl in a queue or crushed up against each other on a Tube – the cloak of invisibility and cone of silence must be maintained. (Do not fall foul of this Code, to make eye-contact or to speak will incur social embarrassment of Les Patterson proportions.)
There’s also a mammoth amount of inconsideration. For example, at a café today, I was queuing for a cappuccino when a lady-in-Louis-Vuitton pushed in front of me. She just pushed straight in, then her partner? Boyfriend? sidled in too, as if I was invisible. Was I supposed to not notice? (Coming from Australia, we call it like we see it.) Again, on the walk home, a young punk with a pitbull, let his dog off the leash where it promptly crapped on the steps of the local church. Surely the owner was going to remove the mess? Apparently not.
Actually, I don’t know what to make of London. So much history, culture and heritage, but a marked lack of mutual consideration for each other? Perhaps it’s just the tragedy of the commons being played out on a mammoth scale? I don’t know. I’ll keep you posted!