Dirty, grey and beautiful - Eros is a lot like London
“How can you live in this dirty grey shithole of a town?” asked my friend Cory last week. He’d just arrived in London from San Francisco and was horrified by the weather and the general grubbiness of the city. “That grey sky’s so threatening it looks like it wants to challenge me to a fight.”
Personally, I’m not crazy about Cory’s home town either – you’re always being chased down the street by freezing fog, and its houses are so pink and cutesy they look like they should be stables for My Little Pony dolls, not human homes. At the same time, I understood his reaction. If he saw London through my eyes, however, he’d soon come to love it as much as I do. Once you get to know somewhere, the way any city looks matters far less than the people and events you connect it with. Living in London is a bit like getting a great blow job from somebody who, when the lights come on, turns out to have bloodshot eyes and bad skin – just because they don’t always look pretty, doesn’t mean the whole thing can’t feel amazing.
Even Archway's pretty if you're in love
When I pass through nondescript Archway in North London, for example, I always feel like smiling. It’s not the rusting 60s office blocks, the dirty traffic island or the many local choices for halal kebabs that make me happy, striking though they are.
No, It’s because it reminds me of great times visitng an ex-boyfriend of mine who lived there. I was working in a club back then, and when I took the night bus up to his after work, I always felt a wriggle of excitement when I passed the industrial-looking catholic church, knowing I’d be slipping into bed with him within five minutes.
Usually he was already asleep, so I used to warm my hands under the hot tap so as not to give him a shock when I crept in under the duvet. Nowadays, I seem to be in Archway only to visit Accident and Emergency at the hospital, but the place is still lit up with those memories for me, even if I’m there for stitches rather than a snog.
Likewise, the Victoria and Albert Museum has long been more than just a huge, florid lumber room full of random old stuff. I split up with the very same Archway boyfriend in the courtyard there (the one with the North American pines). It was a strange Brief Encounter-ish break up where we kept our voices clipped and low even when swearing, so as not to disturb the people around us drinking their cups of awful institutional tea. That may not be the cheeriest of memories, but it certainly gives the place more resonance that it might have for a fly-by night tourist.
Ugly, isn't it?
Now the sun’s out and his jetlag has worn off, Cory’s harsh take on our city has softened a bit, and he seems to be on his way to making memories that will humanise the place for him. Who knows? If he falls for someone while he’s here, maybe even that rain-swept roundabout at Vauxhall might start looking pretty.
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