Being elsewhere

Coming back from London, for me at least, always induces a certain sense of feeling defeated.

I like to feel that I’m a natural city dweller. I can navigate a Tube map with unflappable finesse, I can mooch round edgy shops without seeming out of place, I can weave through pedestrians at high velocity and cross a busy street - just about - without being twatted by a bus. Not only that but I’ve also, after years of practice, perfected the look. You know the one, the paint-stripping glare you are supposed to do when somebody irritates you in a crowded place. This, I remain convinced, is probably the single most crucial thing you need in your armoury throughout your time in the capital.

I’ve even learned, after a few painful misfires, the dark art of not talking on the Underground. It remains an unwritten rule of London that nobody speaks on the Tube. Any conversation, however innocuous, is always greeted by the same reaction. It doesn’t matter whether you’re saying “Shall we change at Green Park?” or “That meal last night was fantastic”, because everyone in the carriage invariably reacts as if what you have really come out with is “That small child in the corner is especially sexy isn’t he?” or worse still “I personally reckon that Dancing In The Moonlight by Toploader must be the finest pop single ever made.”

Then they give you that look I was talking about, a look which I only really learned after I had incurred it many, many times. Maybe that’s how everybody learns to do it, like that dreadful story about giving monkeys electric shocks that they once used tediously at work as a parable to try to urge us to challenge cultural norms.

Yet I still never feel like I belong in London.

When you live in the provinces like I do (and all that “oh, Reading is practically Zone 8” piffle I come out with at parties is mainly to convince me rather than you, and it’s really not working so far) you always feel a little like a yokel who’s there for the day, pointing at bendy buses and saying “the giant metal horse is awful scaring me“. It might be partly about the path my life has taken; when I left university most of my contemporaries, like Dick Whittington, headed there to seek their fortunes and I expect more than a few of them succeeded. They would sooner have roughly fed their genitals into a shredder than moved to the suburbs of anywhere.

I on the other hand went back to Reading to move back in with my mother and brother, only to discover that nothing had changed one iota. London was at the cutting edge of everything, meanwhile we were busy getting excited about the opening of a Yates Wine Lodge. It was brilliant actually; every Friday night my friends and I - a constant fixture there back in those days - would be up on the first floor, at the balcony scoping out the talent (there never was any) and without fail at 10pm the whole building would reverberate to the sound of the theme from Star Wars for reasons I never managed to fathom. I was usually in an olive gingham shirt from Gap and had been so liberally doused in Eau de Suburban Desperation that you could probably smell me in Penzance. Oh, and you could get a pint of Fosters for a quid.

But that’s beside the point. Or worse still it proves my point, not sure which.

Even now, when I finally have the money to properly enjoy everything London has to offer, it somehow seems a little fraudulent to do so. We have a love-hate relationship with London you see, us folk who live outside the capital. When I’m there I simultaneously feel pleased as punch to be in such a wonderful place with so many incredible things to do and see - look, isn’t Liberty the most amazing shop in the whole wide world! Wow, I simply can’t decide which of the fantastic places on Marylebone High Street to have lunch in. I could sit at this café on the South Bank and watch the people going past for hours. All bookshops should be like Daunt Books, if I ran the world I would compulsorily purchase every Waterstones and give them to the owners - and painfully aware of the injustice of it all. It’s simply not fair that everything so truly marvellous is concentrated there. If something that feels remotely Londonesque makes it out to Reading, you just know the concept will be so diluted by then that it’s become truly naff and that, in London terms, it will have jumped the shark. Add to this a media that is written by people in London for people in London who don’t really appreciate that the rest of the country even exists and it can feel very lonely out here on the fringes of civilised society.

One of my first proper girlfriends was properly London through and through. Born near the Holloway Road she went to school in Camden and Oxford was the natural next step. She now writes mind-bendingly dull stuff about mergers for the Telegraph. When I visited her in North London I felt gauche and easily impressed. When she came to my hometown I was far far prouder of her than I ever could have been of it. But even then I wasn’t fully prepared for her take on Reading. “It’s all right I guess,” she said, “But I wouldn’t really want to participate.”

That attitude, I think, is rife among Londoners. There’s a feeling of entitlement and confidence that you are at the very epicentre of the universe which, it seems, is not inconsistent with complaining about it all the time. It’s very confusing, and it gets more confusing still when you realise that there’s a whole food chain of conurbations and that although Reading’s not at the top it’s also pretty far from the bottom. That there are probably people living in the truly awful parts of Britain - the Stokes, the Hulls, the Basingstokes - that may well look at my little town with much the same jaded envy. After all, we have a Pret a Manger and everything. In fact now I come to think of it, when I had to go to Warrington last year for a meeting - on pain of dismissal I might add - I was so overjoyed to find that they had a Caffe Nero that I almost dropped to my knees and kissed the tarmac.

On Sunday, my birthday celebrations a pleasant and proximate memory, Kelly and I sat outside Le Pain Quotidien in Covent Garden with a glass of wine apiece and a gorgeous platter of antipasti watching the tourists shamble past like sightseeing zombies and feeling all our cares had completely melted away. And yes, I know, this would be the height of naff for any of my Londoner readers. I bet none of you ever go to Covent Garden if you can help it and think Le Pain Quotidien is all over the place. But I’d happily sacrifice ten per cent of my Facebook friends to Satan just to have a branch open near me.

My birthday celebrations, incidentally, were a superbly raucous and not remotely highbrow affair in my favourite Greek restaurant which, this being Reading, is of course the only Greek restaurant in town. It was a deeply civilised affair in which the main three topics of conversation (as far as I can recall) were: how excellent the verb “to spaff”, which I was introduced to by my excellent friend Mikey, is and how it should be used at every available opportunity given that I’ve totally failed to popularise “clunge”; the origin and uses of the evergreen comic phrase “two in the goo, one in the poo”, which I was introduced to by my excellent friend Dave; and how there are a remarkably large number of websites devoted to the potential for extremely twisted interaction between deviant humans and exceptionally horny dolphins doing what appears to come naturally, which I was introduced to by my excellent friend Ivor.

There’s a bit of a trend there isn’t there? And people say I’m a bad influence. How little they know.

So I’ve had a lovely couple of days in London. I loved dinner on Sunday night, eating delicious rich faggots in the whitewashed, spartan space of St John Bread and Wine. I even liked strolling up Sloane Street, feeling intimidated and impoverished by the preposterously chi-chi boutiques. I nearly laughed so much that I gave myself a hernia when I saw the Dodi and Diana memorial statue in Harrods, looking to all the world like Barack Obama and Robert Redford in a still from the campest musical of all time. Lunch at the magnificent Polpo was a particular treat, ordering delicious cicheto after cicheto, sipping Gavi and trying hard to overhear the increasingly odious conversation of the couple next to me without Kelly feeling comprehensively ignored. And of course I adored having cocktails off Bond Street after work with Louise before rushing off to grab some unbelievably moreish Thai calamari (they should give them to addicts to wean them off crack) and jumping into a black cab for a race against time to make it to the Barbican for the start of a mildly disappointing concert by the peerless Magnetic Fields.

The Magnetic Fields - You Must Be Out Of Your Mind

So I may not quite feel like I belong in London, but it’s not because I don’t love it there. Of course I love London, how could you not? I wonder whether what both appeals so strongly and feels so jarring is the concept of elsewhere. At coffee with Louise this afternoon I found myself envying her as she discussed her plans to jet off to Paris for Easter, and yet people from all over the world would dearly love to find London as easy to reach as it is for me.

I think that feeling of otherness might be what this is really about. This morning Kelly and I took breakfast at the Wolseley. The service was impeccable, the setting impressive. All around me I could see people having intense conversations, making deals and decisions and being part of a hub of something I couldn’t fully understand. I spotted one celebrity and at least three men to which the term “grandee” could have been convincingly applied. The food wasn’t bad either, although of course that’s hardly the point. But none of this was me - because I’ve spent the last two days, brilliant fun though they’ve been, borrowing somebody else’s life, trying it on for size. And I’m afraid it doesn’t fit, much as I wish it did.