Friendly neighbours enrich lives
SING along if you know this one: “Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, that eye contact is tough. And maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, that I’ll shove past ya in a mighty huff !” You get the picture.
Londoners have a reputation for being unfriendly and impatient. Just the other day, a young woman on a tube train “priority seat” was gently asked by a heavily-pregnant woman to give it up. She refused.
“It’s not my fault you’re pregnant,” she declared, kissing goodbye to a Pride of Britain award nomination. “You chose to get pregnant. Why should I give you my seat?” Had it been me needing the seat, I would have sat on her, but the pregnant woman seemed better-mannered than me. Perhaps she was an “immigrant” to London from Cornwall.
After some kerfuffle and raised voices, a City suit stood up and mumbled an offering of his seat to the mother-to-be. Little Miss Sunshine in the priority seat scowled at this audacious kindness. She had made it perfectly clear that pregnant women should be made to travel on the roof.
I doubt she would have behaved that way in a part of the country where it was likely that she’d bump into anyone on that carriage again. London’s vast and often transient community makes it an easy place be unreasonable.
The life of a stand-up comic has given me the good fortune of constantly travelling the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. I’ve performed in the big cities and the remote countryside – places where, when you ask folk for directions, they don’t just point the way but walk you there. I need at least a week to shake off London for this to not feel like the mother of awkward.
The Midlands are among the best for engaging a stranger in a chat. Don’t let the downbeat accent fool you – Birmingham folk, I’ve found, are the most confident natterers.
I am now on the Hebridean leg of my stand-up tour. I’m writing this in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis where I performed last night in a café in the woods. In the Highlands, you are forced to relax and shelve your self-important “I’m just so busy” London ways. The mountains put you in your place before the locals do.
The scenery here reminds you what a puny bit of carbon you really are, and you had better be nice because no one has time for any uppity “me me me” nonsense. I learned this in the chemist when I was forced to listen to a 10-minute conversation about a cocker spaniel’s mental health problems before the lady at the counter finally rang through my piles cream. I was then drawn into a jolly discussion about the agony of piles with utter strangers.
Loneliness is a big danger in London. For all its bustle and crowds and the abundance of things to do, if you are new to an area, how do you get mates? It’s all right for children – they can bond in the park over something they’ve found. If I went up to a friendlylooking woman in the street and said, “Look at my stick, do you want to hold it?” I doubt she’d be keen to come for cocktails. Teenagers and party animals naturally find each other. But what do other people do?
I spent too long locked in lonely anxiety in my younger days to have any time for it now. I moved into a new area when I was a single, pregnant mom. Myself, my five-year-old and my bump moved into to a new house, away from the nest of friends I had previously made. Before I’d unpacked, I marched to my neighbours’ houses on either side and the two opposite me and introduced myself.
Within days, my next-door neighbour on the left was deadheading roses for me and removing dead mice from under my garden furniture. The woman who beeped at my elderly neighbour to hurry out of her taxi one night was not expecting an army of us running out in our PJS to get all “London” on her.
London may never be like the Outer Hebrides, but if we knock on doors, say hello and get our arses off seats a little quicker for others, we may become, at the very least, more Brummie.