Capital Flight

It’s been a long, long time since I was last out in London in the evening. Ms Formerly Aldgate didn’t want to go to Silvia from the LGMG’s birthday party at Aces & Eights in Tufnell Park last Saturday, but I thought as I sat on the Tube of the times a couple of years ago when I was fighting my way through the crowds on weekday evenings a couple of nights a week to see her, as well as doing other things. The weekend travellers are very different from the commuters; and I felt a strange air of unreality. Perhaps young people now seem faintly unreal to me anyway, but I suspect it’s down to being surrounded by anonymous people in anonymous surroundings, as compared to the familiarity of Swanvale Halt whose streets and buildings I know well and where it’s unusual not to meet half a dozen people I know on my journey down the hill to the church (at least in term-time: this week it’s half-term and the streets are almost deserted at 8.45am).

It was worth the trip, however, as I had some pleasurable conversations with people I hadn’t seen for ages. The nub of these revolved around the following topics: 1. How old we all are; 2. How many people have moved out of London; 3. How with the removal of various clubs and events there’s increasingly little worth going to anymore; and 4. How we don’t have the energy to go to it even if there was. Ms MetalPole explained how her work at a dental surgery takes her out of the house at 7am and doesn’t allow her back home until 7.30pm. Silvia herself has decamped to Hertfordshire. Even my accountant Ms Death&Taxes, inveterate veteran of every Goth club you can think of, admitted that the delights of night life are less and less able to counteract inertia and the temptations of the sofa. I asked her whether she saw younger people coming into the Goth world. ‘I see some at Slimelight, and they’re often quite beautiful, very dressed up and creative, but they’re mainly coming from miles away’, she said. Of course people moving out of London because they reach the point where they want a different sort of life is nothing new, and that accounts for some of my friends’ moves, but there are newer factors creeping in. Later in the week I heard of another couple who are leaving London because they simply can’t afford to live there anymore, and relocating to Birmingham.