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London March '99

Nickjenkins
2003-11-20 12:44:01

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travelling in Australia I have had few that come close to spending half an hour in the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice, watching the sun set over a highland Loch near Glasgow or having a leisurely coffee in the grounds of the Alhambra, the Almohavid palace in Grenada.

One of the things that make these experiences so valuable is the disparity between those experiences and the familiar experiences of my homeland. Within the distance I would normally consider in Australia to be the minimum I would need to travel to experience different scenery there must be fifty countries each with its own scenery, language, culture and heritage. Within a matter of hours I can go from sandy desert to snowy mountain, from hot-blooded Spanish flamenco to stately Viennese waltz and from lyrical Italian to guttural Dutch.

But, as I have said, all this comes at a cost.

As I write a riot has erupted in Central London. A peaceful protest over the abolition of third world debt has turned ugly and riot police have been called in to stop looting and control the crowd. Civilisation may only be three meals away from anarchy but in a big city anarchy can be a lot closer to the surface than that.

It will be disappointing to many that a protest in such a noble cause, the removal of the sword of debt from over the heads of many of the worlds poorest countries was marred by violence. But violence is a common occurrence here. In my two months spent so far in London we’ve had racially motivated murders, nail bomb attacks, rapes, a spate of muggings and, as you might’ve read, a full scale riot.

While I would never contemplate living in the country I’m beginning to think that living in a smaller city, at the bottom of a smaller social gravity well so to speak, will be much preferable.

My parents will probably laugh reading all of this. After all they picked Perth some 30 years ago for much the same reasons and emigrated out of the chaos of London. Now, I have returned to live and work here and have settled in a house not two suburbs from where they used to live.

Sometime too I think that I will migrate out of here to happier climes. To those of you who have the energy and endurance to stay behind and enjoy the excitement, bon chance, I envy you.

I will sit with my friends on the veranda of my four bedroom home in Perth, watch the sea breeze come in from the Indian Ocean in the evening and raise a glass to all the people left here in London.

My travels