London Feels Dark Beneath Its Football Glamour

2023-07-21 original Society & Ideas

A transcript of something I posted on Radiotalk. It’s semi-automatically transcribed using voice recognition, so please excuse any parts that are hard to read.

“I have a bit of time, so let me talk about what I felt in London.

I went to London last month, in May. London, well. I love the Premier League, so it’s a great place for football too, since I’m an Arsenal fan. That said, honestly, I felt a certain harshness there.

I went to London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Copenhagen. I also went to Cambridge. But looking back, London’s atmosphere really stood out as dark. That was my first instinct. Quiet? A bit dark. Well, that might partly be the weather.

I had an old friend there, so I talked with him. And, yeah, it came down to the gap between rich and poor. The reasons might be slightly different depending on who you ask, but overall, wages haven’t kept up with rising prices, that’s what I felt.

Wages are rising. But prices are rising far faster, especially in central London, which inevitably makes living conditions tough. He told me that’s why he lives a bit outside London, in the suburbs.

But even so, it still seemed financially tight. He’s an associate professor at a certain university, a fairly respectable position, and when I asked about his salary, he does get paid decently. But still, that seemed to be the reality.

By the way, I tried to go from London to Cambridge, but along the way, well, not exactly along the way, I ended up postponing it by a day. The trains had stopped. Suddenly. In the morning I thought, huh? The trains have stopped, so I pushed the date back.

They’d stopped because of a strike. The railway workers’ strike didn’t halt the trains completely, but it cut the number of trains running, so trains to Cambridge ended up running only once every few hours or so. So I gave up. Of course, I could have forced it by taking a taxi, but since it was a trip with plenty of schedule flexibility, I decided that wasn’t necessary and postponed it.

Still, once I got there, this was a meeting with a partner, and while we were talking, they mentioned that wage increases were really tough, and that last week, for example, there’d been a strike by school teachers.

Of course, I think the threshold for going on strike, how high or low it is, feels quite different between Japan and the UK. It was common in the US too. Strikes by Caltrain and VTA and so on happened fairly often, I remember. I imagine that without doing that, wages wouldn’t stay at a level people find acceptable. But there’s also a flip side of hardship to that, I felt, honestly. And the way I see it, the town is dirty. There are clearly some run-down areas. Yeah, I think that’s the flip side of it, no, flip side, actually more like the front side of it, that’s how it struck me.

In that sense, the Netherlands too. Amsterdam is a tourist spot, so it was a bit lacking in some ways, but Rotterdam struck me as very clean. And then there’s Copenhagen. Copenhagen was also incredibly clean. It really felt like the one place, by Japanese standards of hygiene, where I could actually live. That was a nice place. A bit cold, though.

Now, going back to England, to London, I rode the subway a lot. I really like public transportation. When I go abroad, I really enjoy riding buses and trains. Doing that shows you a lot about the character and situation of a place, I feel. I like observing things like that.

As for the subway, the facilities are old, and the seats are incredibly hard, so on a 40-minute ride to the airport, you start to feel it. Some pretty sketchy-looking people were using it too. The general vibe didn’t feel very safe.

By the way, I once took a bus to Heathrow. Route nine, I think it was. The subway would get you to Heathrow in about 40 minutes, and since I’d booked a hotel in Kensington, it would have taken about the same by subway, but instead I took a bus that took an hour and a half, almost two hours. In exchange, it was extremely cheap. I tried it once. Since it was that cheap, I imagine a lot of the people on it were airport workers. There weren’t many businesspeople, from what I could tell. It did pass through residential areas, so people getting on were coming from surprisingly nearby, so there were probably local residents too, but overall it felt like there were more laborers.

And then, I’m not sure who exactly they were, but there were people talking about fairly intense things, so-called, yeah, people who’d probably immigrated to the UK. Or maybe their kids, I’m not sure. And, um, yeah, speaking in a language I didn’t understand. Not English. Some people who seemed pretty rough around the edges too. That was roughly my impression of London.

That’s about it, I think. I used to live in the US, so I very often think about wanting to try living in some other country. And since I travel abroad a lot for work, I often think about what it would be like to live in various places, but unfortunately, London wasn’t one of them. Yeah, it just didn’t strike me that way.

Football’s great, though. Football is great. But we have kids, you know. Thinking about the environment for raising kids, retirement, and so on, I wondered whether this really is the right area. The right kind of growth, the right economic conditions, is this really a place where you can get that going forward? It didn’t feel like a good place. I was almost convinced of it. I ended up thinking it’s probably not a very good area. So, that’s the story of how London got crossed off my list of places to move to. That’s all.”

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2023/07/1547/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.