Richard Baum

I am back from London. Back to Manchester, with any semblance of relaxation and any trace of rejuvenation wiped clean from my soul the moment it occurred to me that the first thing I needed to do on arrival was board a creaking and late Metrolink all the way to my rainy house.

London is a wondrous place. Not wondrous because it is wonderful (although much of it is), but because a gigantic proportion of it leaves me gaping in a slack-jawed trance, wondering things. The entire place is like any other city squared, and then squared again, and then cubed, to the power of eight. The people, the buildings, the transport… Living in Manchester I get the impression that I’m part of a global city. But compared to London it’s like living on the straw-covered stable floor of a one-house hamlet in the wilderness.

My hotel was in the City, a part of town I hadn’t even ventured anywhere near in my dozens upon dozens of visits to London before. That in itself sets the place apart from anywhere else. A visit to another city in the UK means seeing pretty much everything in a weekend. I could spend a year in London and not get past the first chapter of the brick-sized guidebook I took with me.

I was close by The Gherkin. I have no idea what its real name is, and I don’t care. Because here is a thirty-odd story office building shaped like a pickled cucumber. It’s a miraculous feat. And just one of many improbable buildings around virtually every corner. I don’t know when glass became so strong that entire cloud-touching mega-towers could be built entirely out of it without so much as a concrete pillar in sight, but it really is something to behold.

And the place is so busy… I stumbled back to my hotel at about 1am one night and it was no less noisy and crowded than twelve hours before. The whole city reminds me of an airline terminal. Always a stream of people milling around, half of them rushing, half of them shopping, most of them with big bags. A thousand different ethnicities and I’ll never see the same face twice.

That’s not to say I didn’t recognise half the people I saw. I don’t know if this is a modern symptom of going to university and living in a world where people move round lots, but on every tube escalator and around every corner I saw half-forgotten faces of people I thought I might have known. I didn’t know them of course, but it was very off putting. Like being on the edge of drunkenness and forgetting you’re at a school reunion.

There’s no peace. In the middle of the night the sirens and the taxis… And you need to be a billionaire to live far enough back from the street to escape the noise. I am (unsuccessfully) selling a flat here at the moment for a price which wouldn’t buy a roof-tile in London. It’s just plain mad. My contemporaries in five-years-out-of-university-type jobs will be lucky to afford anything there ever. The man who served me my “Angry Whopper”meal at Euston station would have to save up every penny of his wage for twenty years to buy a one-bed flat.

They still have the Underground though, the frequency and reliability and overall quality of which makes our Metrolink a genuine laughing-stock. And they have free travel for kids. Which we should have too.

I met old friends. I walked a lot. And it was fun. But I don’t think I could live there. It’s relentless and after a while I’d get accustomed to the wonders and then what would be the point of being there at all? London’s a treat. I like to take the car and go somewhere green and quiet. And you can’t do that there.

I’m back now though. With meetings this week, and a speech to Council on Wednesday, which I wrote today. More of this later in the week…

Rick