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| 2018, like every year since about 1986, is dumping even bigger, even uglier, even more arrogant-looking SUVs on our narrow streets. What is the enduring appeal of these ghastly, gurning thug-mobiles? And why are they nearly all black, with tinted passenger windows? |
Restricting it to the bad things about London life, they are things that became noticeably worse in 2017 and show every sign of continuing in that direction - because nothing really goes in discrete years, does it? Apart from calendars and academics, perhaps.
There are the obvious exceptions: things we did not expect to have to put up with. Like the new £10 notes, which pull off the impressive feat of being both slippery and sticky at the same time.
These apologies for currency are the perfect embodiment of everything that is wrong with the UK - perhaps the whole western world - in 2018. They're meant to represent progress, to be "greener" and cleaner and more efficient. But everybody hates them (and not just the vegans).
I've already lost at least one new tenner, handing over two stuck together. Whether the shopkeeper knew or not I don't know - but all the checkout staff I've talked to say they hate the new notes, for similar reasons.
This nasty plasticky stuff is no longer real f-f-folding money. Try and crunch one up into a little ball and it gradually unfurls itself. Horrible, horrible things, like the nastiest shrink-wrap packaging on the nastiest foodstuffs.
Trouble is I dislike them so much that I have an urge to spend them quickly just to get them out of sight, i.e I am wasting a lot more money. Doing just what the Treasury wants, spending with the new notes. Is this really a government scheme to kill off cash completely?
That was a long digression! And not a London story, but affecting every poor cash-user in this crackpot country. But, as I am no longer a journalist (never really was, in truth), and do not need to care about the attention span of readers, I'm going to write as much as I like about whatever I like.
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| Roving which range, exactly? All those big black shiny new SUVs with their dark tinted windows are making suburban streets look like the overflow parking lot for a convention of undertakers |
All the other complaints are carried over from previous years, previous decades. Have already moaned endlessly about the curse of ever-more-bloated four wheel drive cars cramming the tight suburban backstreets of south London.
I'm going to keep on moanin', lord yes. Much more, louder moaning for 2018.
These fat bastard vehicles are killing us in so many ways. Go down to Northcote Road ("Nappy Valley") on any weekend and watch the latest Mercedes, Audi, Rover, BMW, Volvo and Porsche versions of these hearse-like conveyances lumbering up and down this little road, jousting for access into the small side-streets and limited parking places. If you're not inside one, watch out for your life. The drivers do not always deign to look down their elegant noses at us mortals on the streets beneath them.
There's another, linked phenomenon which is quite hard to understand: the majority of the newest, biggest, shiniest SUVs in the poshest streets around here are jet black. The bigger and newer the SUV, the blacker and shinier it seems. One street in particular seems to have become a sort Mafia parking lot.
All the SUVs are black, and they all have darkly-tinted windows for the passenger area. Often you see big blokes in black suits, white shirts and black ties polishing these vehicles. Who are the owners, are they so famous and important that they are at risk of car-jacking and abduction? Are they frightened the hoi-polloi will throw rotten eggs at them? If only....
While on the subject of automobiles, there is another annoying and dangerous trend - the fondness manufacturers have for LED lights, mainbeams and sidelights alike. They are so bright as to temporarily blind anyone unfortunate enough to be in their glare. The stupid fairy-light adornments, eyebrow shapes over the headlamps, zig-zags around the rear light...are just vulgar and annoying. Adding to the extreme ugliness of so many of these confections of plastic, steel, glass and rubber.
Also they can be extremely dangerous - as, coincidentally, the RAC yet again pointed out the day this entry was posted.
Anger!
But the next one is linked: the rise of generalised, unfettered, foul-mouthed rage. Anger, so much anger; impotent rage, cursing, shouting, fists raised and blood-vessels disteneded rage; and then turns to physical violence. Twice in a week I witness this. The bike hits the pedestrian at the Half Moon junction in Herne Hill. Felled cyclist springs up, stares in disbelief at the bits of expensive plastic that have broken off his machine, then takes a groggy swipe at the dusty pedestrian who has only just got on his feet.
And then, at the Brixton Town Hall crossroads, a cyclist stops and raps on the driver's window of an Addison Lee people-carrier. Window winds down, big snarling face stares out, about to mouth obscenities, but the cyclist gets his pre-emptive strike in first - a stream of saliva, spat fast into the driver's cabin.
Cyclist zooms off, Addison Lee in hot pursuit, makes as if to ram bike, then rams on brakes instead. Common sense, perhaps, prevails; the looming court case, the lost job, local news reports ...maybe these flashed through driver's consciousness. Let's just scare the shit out this fucker.
Anger, rage. On trains, buses, in the queues at Sainsburys, at the post office. Parking worst of all.
Worst-case media horror trend of selfish UK public behaviour so far this year - the rude scrawled notes stuck on ambulances parked briefly outside the houses of these angry vehicle-obsessed people, whose anger - once mainly confined to in the forums of certain newspaper websites - now seems to be spilling out all over the shop.
I feel my own anger mounting, as I write. None of us is immune - this is the prevailing psychic environment; anger; fear; it's contagious.
Beep! Beep!
Expressions of anger are all around us at all times in stressed-out, tensed-up London. Again, the worst and most visible is on the roads. The screech of tyres as an over-hasty driver slams on brakes at a junction. Absurd over-revving of expensive but poorly silenced engines: an intimidation by accelerator pedal and exhaust pipe.
The realisation by murderous psychopaths that cars are very effective weapons, especially if you want to kill several people at one fell swoop, and permanently injure many more. A new motor-psycho sickness.
At the merely annoying end of same spectrum: the inevitable, ever increasing use of the car horn to express rage - the high-powered air-horns, weaponised, enough to make you jump in the air, to make your heart tremble. This topic was covered here before - see "A pox on your blaring horns" from 2013 – and it is worse now.
Time to revive the notion of the Inverse Blare Bill, as recommended on this site all those years ago. The simple idea was to legislate to make sure the most macho and aggressive vehicles emit the feeblest, silliest, most embarrassing noises when the hooter is activated. Only the smallest and sweetest of cars - say a 2CV or Topolino - would be allowed to make a strident beeping sound.
There are many other topics to get het up about - such as the proliferation of dogs and the their doings. Why have so many dog-owners stopped picking up their darling doggies' turds? How many times must we get home, get all the way up the carpeted staircase to the fourth four flat, and only then notice the vile, tell-tale stink.
Fed up with all this food
Then - another cause of mounting Calvinist-style intolerance in this bitter old bastard - there is this constantly increasing London hyper-obsession with food.
So ironic, so typically bonkers British, that at exactly the same time we are told ours is the fattest population in Europe, we are also bombarded day in, day out with editorials heaping praise on obscenely extravagant food-feasting....
Latent annoyance at the gourmet-gastro-masterchef culture burst to the surface when handed a free copy of a fat, luxurious magazine called Foodism.
Yes, Foodism! Here it was, a great beautifully printed wodge of nosh-porn. It didn;t get my juices flowing, I'm afriad - but it did make my blood begin to boil, gently. Trouble is, I love food. Most of us do - and we certainly depend on it for our existence, unless we are vampires. I love what I think is good food; what you can get in a cheap, ordinary restaurant in almost any local bar or cafe or restaurant in France, Italy or SPain, at normal prices.
Because in those and many other countries, good food is nothing to do with "foodism" or gourmet cooking, it is what everyone expects as a right. Decent ingredients, well cooked, in simple, classic styles.
Alas, even these fine countries are being invaded by the Anglo-American industrialisation of food, a phased invasion of fast food and junk food and then - the ultimate paradox, the final insult - selling them back bastardised versions of their own dishes as something healthy and fashionable to aspire to.
That's why it's so annoying to be told that London is now the world's food capital or similar rubbish. London is just the place where there are enough rich and gullible and ignorant and incompetent and fashion-addicted people to allow all manner of tricksters to open stupid ridiculous new on-theme eateries, and to get people queuing in the rain to spend a week's average wage on some sickening variant of a hamburger and chips.
All of this comes wrapped up with another paradox: how can London be a city both of extreme Veganism and extreme carnivores? How many different "gourmet" burger joints does a suburban high street need? The Five Guys/Byron/Haché thing seems to be outstripping Americanised Italian coffee shops in this blighted area.
A few years ago, the fashion was all for "pulled" meats. Even if I ate pork, I can't imagine asking for a pulled-pork bun or whatever. Don't the images this coupling of words evokes put you off these juicy meaty products, as well?
Obviously not.
But these days the food fashions seem to have got even less delectable. Weird rainbow-colored doughnuts; great gloops of stringy cheese in warmed buns; ill-advised hybrids, such as the awful cronut.
Am stopping here before I blow a gasket. Good night!
