Rampant Anomie

Greater London is home to about seven million people, a fair proportion of whom must actually want to live there. Arriving at Kings Cross from the sticks is always a culture shock. It's not that Lincolnshire is some bucolic idyll, all sun-dappled lanes and ruby-cheeked farmers raising their cider jugs to you as you amble past on your straw-hatted nag to nowhere in particular. It's just that London is at the centre of our culture in the same way that the colon is at the centre of the human body. Yes, it has art, culture, old buildings, big buildings, history, a marathon, Sir Alan Sugar and so on. But it also has astonishing property prices, obliging even high earners to live in the kind of squalor that homeless people in Hull would scoff at. It has teeming multitudes all vying for the same pavement space, bus seats and stale oxygen on the tube. It has high crime and poor air quality. It has lots of exciting and appealing jobs, if you don't mind spending four hours a day commuting and having your first coronary at 39. And the tap water tastes like it's passed through every Eastenders cast member since Anita Dobson, without being treated.

I'm glad they elected Boris, mainly because I don't live there. And don't get me started on the expansion of Heathrow. Oh, go on then. It's getting more and more difficult to get a long haul flight from anywhere other than Heathrow. This despite the fact that Heathrow is just about the least convenient UK airport for anyone not from London. And don't get me started on the Heathrow Express, whereby the unwitting traveller can find himself paying five times the price of a Ryanair ticket to Nice to get from Waterloo to Heathrow. Welcome to London.

Like any professional traveller to a conflict zone, I employ a local fixer whenever we hit London. I can't reveal his true identity for fear that he'll be ejected from his Pearly King troupe or spurned by other metrosexuals, so I'll just refer to him as Bill. We'd never blend in by ourselves, possessing neither cockney, mockney or Australian accents, nor the kind of exotic foreign tongues that make the average London Burger King kitchen sound like the UN General Assembly.

Bill tried to help us blend in. We spent the afternoon roaming Hampstead Heath but failed to spot any trouserless Tory MP's or tell George Smiley that the pike had flown north at midnight. We spurned Highgate Cemetery for the tourist trap it was, although I secretly wanted to pop in and search for the grave of Dan Dare. On the local high street, we drooled over estate agents' windows before popping in to a local hostelry where the Norwegian barmaid served us Belgian wheat beer. We then retired to Bill's pied-a-terre where we listened to light jazz, warmed our cockles with cucumber vodka and a fine Gewurtzraminer, and enjoyed a home made southern Indian marsala made from scratch using ingredients picked by Bill on a special trip to the Punjab, sorry, the local Waitrose. Which was nice.

TBC

This travelogue isn't going to take me to the heights of the Hindu Kush, nor to the depths of the Marianas Trench. I won't be sharing the sputum of wild boars with cannibalistic pygmies from the Ribble Valley, nor navigating the Sahel with only a skateboard and a piece of string. No account of this trip will give the reader much that they couldn't find in a travel agent's window, and I won't deviate much from my usual solipsistic style. But it's about time I started to keep a journal, and you're most welcome to indulge my peripatetic ramblings.

My first fatuous foray into fiction has taught me that the medium burns through small details like an American car burns through fossil fuel. Besides, memory is a fickle friend, and a mind as crude as mine will soon push aside any notion that doesn't lead to food, sex or sleep (read on, and I promise at least one of those will come your way). So, I feel the need to record the gems we uncovered in case all I actually remember is coal, or, in the case of Las Vegas and South Yorkshire, slag.

So, I'll be serialising our US trip, not to immortalise my searing insights into that enigmatic and shy nation, but to give myself a break from grown-up writing which I'm starting to find ruddy difficult. Expect verbiage, parenthesis and unfocussed asides. And sentences poorly structured.

Saturday 22nd March 08

Our trip to San Francisco begins with the No. 2 bus from Branston to Lincoln (via Washingborough). I put on my blue suede shoes and I boarded the 1981 Leyland Wayfarer twin-deck, so to speak. As with most of the vintage buses on this route, I have to touch my chin to my sternum and crouch to walk around, and the upholstery smells like three generations of old, wet retrievers have died on it.

We eventually find a train that will take us to London Village and boldly display our multiple advance APEX deluxe power ranger first class tickets. These allow us to make our way to the hallowed halls of the first class compartment; there, we can sit in slightly bigger seats and enjoy a single tepid beverage of our choice in the knowledge that we could plan a conference with our wi-fi equipment should we so desire. As I nibble my complimentary shortbread petticoat, I know I've struck another mighty blow in the class war.

TBC