There’s something about London… it’s filled with too many bricks, too much concrete and glass, too much steel and too many ambitions. A city pregnant with progress, constantly giving birth to new structures that compete for the space reserved for the sky.
There’s something about London, it’s the place businesses come to die. They move in and thrive for a few months before succumbing to the harsh climates and disappearing over night, leaving behind the remains of what it use to be, its outer shell now displaying the birth banner of the new business that shall take over its vacant body and try its hand at surviving.
There’s something about London and the way it never sleeps. Cars never tire from running, lights are not allowed to dimly rest, sounds can never be quiet and when one job finishes another starts. Yet the city is incomplete: Roads are laid and re-laid, as if the definition of ‘flat’ changes every month. Lines shut down every weekend but never heal from whatever sickness seems to be plaguing them. And every year the city expands outwards, like a greedy child wanting more space to play in, stepping on flowers, digging holes in which to bury stuff, and then becoming bored with the mess it has made and leaving it behind to find newer ground to leave its destructive mark on.
There’s something about this city and how it defines the people that live in it: ‘Londoners.’ We’ve stopped looking up. We’ve forgotten that the real stars live in the sky and shine for us every night regardless of whether we stroke their egos with our attention or not. We’ve forgotten where dreams come from and instead wonder at the stars the media shines in our faces twenty-four hours a day, and look to them for answers to our destiny.
There’s something about Londoners, clichés wrapped up in a contradiction. They're always waiting for someone who never seems to arrive, or always in a hurry to meet someone they forgot was waiting. Full of empty gestures to have reunions they never set dates for, promises to call numbers their fingers no longer know how to dial. Kings and Queens of ‘we should get together’, ‘let me know when you’re free’, ‘I’ll call you sometime.’ Too busy with the concept of being busy to realise they don’t fit its definition; in a hurry to go nowhere.
Riding like zombies on tubes, shutting down like robots, we refuse to engage our peripheral vision. No longer living in houses but surviving in rooms. Running in a race in which the finish line is a myth, too busy looking ahead to enjoy the present, too busy thinking about the future to remember how good it felt to laugh in the past.
There’s something about all cities, scattered like fallen planets trying to reclaim the sky. But I know London I’ve lived in its recesses for what feels like a lifetime. I know its smell, I’ve seen it grow, I know how it breathes and I’ve seen how people are absorbed into its consciousness and take on its reality. There’s something about London and the people that live in it… there’s something missing.
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