I find city life so beautiful. There is such style to it, such vibrancy. The buzz of a metropolis. Never mind the dirt, the pollution, the crime rates. I just see the veins of traffic of people, their beating hearts pumping the blood through the city.
They fill it with their daily habits, their dreams chased, their theatre, museums, cinemas, sports, their need to taste different flavours, hear different sounds, live in beautiful houses, and be around one another, socialize, do business.
I love the way a city wakes up, all the coffee corners around, where people perform their morning rituals, the beauty of them. The promise of a newborn day and the collective experience of it. To someone else, it may look like individualism. I just see people wishing each other “good morning” and “nice to see you again”, “happy to be here”. It’s in their “an espresso, please” and “would that be all for you?”.
I love the cars rushing by, the stones of the buildings, the architecture of the underground and how they shape the landscape of the city. In London, there are the black cabs, the red double-decker buses, majestic white buildings, red bricks, Georgian, Victorian, refreshingly modern.
The underground is like an extension of the pub: cosy, sweaty and one of the few designated spaces where Londoners can freely physically interact. They pretend to feel embarrassed about it, but I suspect they secretly like it, just as in Parliament, way too many people in way too small a space.
I love how people are sweet here, like to make time to have a conversation with you, just to have a little bit of fun, to have a laugh, for the sake of it. I love how they like to make things pretty, the elaborate design of packagings, the carefully decorated cafés and shops, a little poem surprising you in the tube. I love how things can be both understated and over the top, an ambush of flowers safely put behind bars of ironwork fences and borders of grass. I love how people carry themselves with a carefully contained pride that turns into sugar the moment you approach them with a smile.
I love how curious they are, after history, science, arts, nature, adventures. Such great storytellers too, inviting you in to their world of endless imagination and possibilities. The openness to them, never letting themselves sink away in the dark pit of the human soul, but rather keeping their self-deprecating irony.
I realize it is both their strongest and their weakest link. I see the poverty, the poor state of public health and how they try to make up for low-quality food and harmful living conditions by counting steps and calories. It does make me sad. I see how their self-mockery is also a way to express low self-esteem disguised as humour and sold as the virtue of self-knowledge.
But for now, I would just like to tell London, you are beautiful! Thank you for being so kind to me, for calling me “love” and “my lovely”, for telling me your stories, and sharing with me your experience. For the museums free to enter and the street artists bringing a smile to my face, for the food I could try and the shops I could return to again and again just to look around and be dazzled.
For this inspiring place to write, here at Piccadilly, with your gentle ambitious buzz around and me in the eye of your hurricane, now too part of the London veins of people and all that they built. Thank you and see you again soon!
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