London
Capital city of England, Britain, the British empire and the trains don’t go through the night on a Saturday night! The whole metro stop was locked up and barricaded as if someone would steal it.
“Somalia eh? Haven’t been there yet. How are things there now?”
“War.”
Right. We talked about other things. He seemed to think Britain was doing good things for his country. Meanwhile, to survive and pay an insurance premium of £3,000 a month, he was working 19 hours a day. You can learn a lot about a country from its taxi drivers.
It’s the reason I avoided the pubs. But even in Wembley, when I finished work, they were trying to turf working journalists out as if they were in a pub. I finished my last report sitting on the pavement beside the stadium with my back to a pillar.
The work itself was great, the match was fantastic, apart from the result.
“The result is so shit that I cannot....” Jürgen Klopp trailed off. “All the other things were, great.”
Arjen Robben was happy, obviously. Schweini and Thomas Müller sauntered by and Dante had some sort of ghettoblaster thing to his ear, blasting out some Brazilian stuff as he sang along and danced past the journalists without stopping for one interview.
I was so tired by the time I finished after the final I didn’t even have a beer, just collapsed into the bed once the Somali fella had negotiated the closed roads to bring me home – to Hotel Oliver on Cromwell Road.
Not even Cromwell could stop me sleeping. But he was to have the last laugh, the fucker.
They like their steel and glass and soulless shiny buildings in London. Camden, which I’d seen briefly on the Thursday, looked much more interesting than the center, more Berlinery, if hammed up Berlinery. It’s run down but sanitized, not real. Regardless, I couldn’t enjoy that for long either.
Berlin thinks it’s multikulti, but it’s not compared to London, where you have people of all varieties from corners of the world never heard of in the German capital.
Jagged angles or not, I was happy to get back. Not before Cromwell put a curse on my escape. He delayed my plane and cancelled two buses to ensure I only got home at 4.30am. He also ruined my photos. My camera was on some weird setting so only a few survived.
But I survived. Ultimately, that’s all that mattered.
London’s not all bad of course. Almost 50 years ago, the city gave the world The Kinks, and for that I will always be grateful.
Somehow I like to focus on the little details: insurance premiums at 3 thousand quid a month? Sounds more like mafia shake-down money.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I found that hard to believe to be honest. He may have been exaggerating or telling porky pies - which, incidentally, actually exist in London in pie form! - but he was certainly finding it hard to make ends meet. Maybe he had a fleet of taxis and that was the price for all of them.
DeleteGreat blog. Thanks. As someone who comes from London, I love pieces like this. It's a pretty accurate summary - re thieves, signs telling you what you can and can't do, and how ridiculous that tubes stop at night.
ReplyDeleteThanks Elliot! Very nice to hear that, especially from a Londoner!
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