Yes

Sorted.

I'm glad.

tis what i found when i worked on the London Eye, and Sonic Youth were playing Brixton on the Nurse tour one night and i couldnt find someone to cover me.
Transitional Londoners are spazzers.

You also get the problem of people not being arsed to travel from fucking Finchley to somewhere faintly central when I've travelled from the other side of the world, the useless, Londoned fuckers.

London's OK but it gets too much attention. So many people want to either praise it to the hilt, or totally slag it off. It's a bastard in lots of ways, but it keeps your interest enough to suffer its stupid rents, mammoth size, crap transport and hordes of transients. If I could find work abroad I'd leave in a heartbeat, but that's just because I'm bored with England rather than London.

I met Pam Hogg today. By the way.

i called my friend and i'm waiting for her to get here. i told her i wanted to go on an adventure in the night around london so that's what we're going to do because i've never wandered around here at night before, only in manhattan and ireland.

what i'm really excited for though is a night time adventure through suburban america. it's been a very very long time since i've had one of those.

Is that "fashion designer who's allegedly more than just a friend of Siouxsie Sioux" Pam Hogg? Well I never, small world, innit?

Are you sure about that? The only type of Gypsies I know are Romany (with the exception of "Olas" Gypsies, who are, basically, lighter-skinned Gypsies - a mixture of a white man and a Gypsy).

Anyway, I was puzzled when I saw "Snatch" and they had this group of people referring to as "Gypsies" or "Pikeys" - those ones living in caravans and stuff. They looked nothing like Gypsies. Actually, this is how a Romany Gypsy family looks like:

One thing that I like about London these days for sure is that I can get lost into it on a completely personal level, nothing to do with any type of lifestyle or anything.

I agree with demonrail666 that you never get a balance when people write or talk about it. It's a big city with all its problems etc, but it's not exactly inhabited only by monsters, unscrupulous people etc. I have never read anything that describes it with precision, probably because it's impossible to do that.

I absolutely agree about finding your own personal London, and it's for that which I love it most of all. It lends itself to a certain personal anonymity that for some makes it 'cold' but for me makes it quite liberating. I love the fact that I can share the city with people I'll likely never meet or even see.

I've always thought that the best writers on the city have been those that've managed to capture its duality of 'the crowd' and 'the individual', where you are able to find privacy not in spite of its hordes, but because of them.

I've never found that in a city like NY (a place I love, but for very different reasons). There I've found that people connect as an antidote to its bustle. In London, people seem to use that bustle to disappear into their own solitude, in a most interesting way.

For this reason, and without wanting to sound too pretentious, I've always felt that London has a very definite psychological stamp on its populace, that I've yet to find elsewhere.

I feel like that in every city (apart from Leeds now): because there is an ever-changing environment, with the noise and colour of the hordes all around you, and my brain is so occupied with processing it all - it can't manage consecutive thoughts about anything else in the present, and I go into a trance. I agree it's kind of liberating.

I'd like to see a good (and ambitous) author try to capture the 'spirit' of present-day London (in the same way that authors try to with New York), without resorting to chocolate-box stereotypes or just concentrating on the Asian communities, etc; that is unless it's already been done and I've missed it.

okay so i have to ask

how difficult will it be for me as an american citizen to get into your country
and also if i get british citizenship can i have my american citizenship back if i want?

or is the only solution for me to marry that limey bastard?

I hear you and I'm doing that right now myself! Sorry people, if you want to live in the countyryside, please do so without trying to fool yourselves into thinking that you're tough and you live in the big city. Southgate is miles away and I have to get up for work early every day, mon-fri. I'm not travelling for over an hour to get somewhere that is nearer Reading or wherever than London. Not tonight.

I've lived in london for 12 years and never heard of Southgate, I don't blame you for not going!

Nice place and everything, it's just like living outside of London. It's for wusses.

That's more than; my comment was aimed at the people who I ring every time I'm heading to London who know I'm coming at least a week in advance but suddenly find they can't be arsed to get on the tube for 20 minutes. It could be they hate me, but I think it's more likely that the London 'can't be arsed' disease is just so very prevalent these days.

travellers are NOT gypsies.



british chicks have that creamy skinned ass.

irish chicks too ;)

I think it might be possible to have two citizenships as I have two. But I'm not sure everyone can. There are certain circumstances that allows me to have two. What you can't have is two nationalities.

Marry the limey bastard then divorce him. Who's the limey bastard?

EDIT or rather I have British nationality and citizenship of another country.

Yes, Amis (London Fields) and Zadie Smith (White Teeth) have both tried to nail modern London in their fiction, but I don't think either have come close. Theirs is too much a broadsheet-friendly vision of the city, with no real eye for its more subtle aspects (and, because of Britain's strange political and social structuring - a sort of welfare capitalism, of sorts - London is a very subtle, and finely balanced city, I think.)

limey bastard = mi amante

Amis' tries hard to nail London in Success (albeit from the perspective of two heartless males) - it shows it from both ends of the class system, and has lots of brilliant descriptions of the place, and the routines of its workers (getting the train to work is a highlight).

Obviously its vision is too Amis-y, in the same way that even when he tries to write from the perspective of Muhammed Atta - he just writes like Martin Amis. Good though...

Hmmm. "Welfare capitalism", I think that's a pretty good summing up of my political outlook. Reward the strong, protect the weak.

What you describe is 'Keynesian' economics, which was ultimately destroyed by Thatcherism, although traces of it remain in the nation's cities, where a total market economy is impossible due to mass unemployment, council housing, etc.

he's not your amante, he's your novio-- since neither of you is married and you planned to inflict yourselves upon each other in some sort of official way.

though since you've been shacking up he's properly speaking your conviviente.

Just looking that up. Looks interesting. I also like the 'culture of poverty's' sociological group's ideas of fighting poverty which is a kind of a middle ground between Marxist and Capitalist views.

Thatcher was a cunt. And that is that!

thanks for the lesson, but he is not my novio. shit's called off.

what's interesting is i lived in london in '99 for six months. moved there by myself, didn't know a soul, didn't actually know a thing about london. i ended up getting a decent flat right across from the highbury/islington station, which i learned through this thread crack addicts apparently frequent. i walked a lot to the area where the angel stop is off the northern line to eat, go to the movies, record store, etc. i didn't find it soul-less at all; in fact, quite enjoyed it.

my last week before i moved, my mom came and stayed with me and whoever lived above me was on some sort of binge and was screaming at his girlfriend and throwing things all night long - first time my whole stay there that anything like that happened. scared the crap out of us - we called the cops and everything. the next day when i was moving out, on the way to the airport, i told the cab driver the story, who said "that's what you get for living in council flats." so, i was paying 165/week for public housing and never knew it.

but i loved my apartment and loved my neighborhood and, whether it was ignorance or not, i always felt safe, even at night and by myself.

then he's your machucante. ha!

so anyway
i looked around and i've discovered that islington and camden are far less expensive than east london. i like north london as well though which is extremely expensive even by my standards but not out of the question.

i'm going to have to learn how to drive on the left side of the road...i can see that turning into something of a disaster

my boyfriend really wants to move back to the UK which i would love to once i get all the financial shit sorted out properly and all of that boring business. i'll be so happy to be able to let my cats outside which is not happening in new york for obvious reasons, and have room for a doggie (and who knows, maybe a little cantankerous)

I was pretty worried about that too when I first moved to this backasswards wrong side of the road country, but in truth it takes just about ANYBODY all of ten minutes to get used to. The only thing that's really difficult is remembering which lever is the turn signal and which is the windshield wiper.

oh are the turn signal and wiper levers reversed?

the only reason i'm worried about it is because i'm a terrible driver anyway. oh and my license is expired.

so late 70s

instead, nowadays...

Yes, they're reversed, which is annoying as fuck for the first month or so, but on the whole you'll be no worse on the left side of the road than you are on the right.

well that's reassuring. thank you.
note to self: must work on reckless driving.

2 weeks ago you wanted your uterus surgically removed.

shall i quote, or are you considering adoption?

or is a little cantankerous some kind of pet monkey?

yeah the uterus removal thing. go ahead and quote me on that because it gives me trouble ie terrible cramps and back pain and sore boobs. but that's only every once in awhile.
well i don't rule out children entirely. but they are a lot of work and not something i need or want to be dealing with at the moment. if i decide on children i would definitely adopt one, there are so many kids in other countries (and even at home in the US and in the UK) who need a good home and a mommy to take care of them and i would totally be willing.

ps monkeys are dirty. no.

Nobody gets to know a place well unless they get out of their house and meet people on a regular basis.