London Letter: Today’s London would have tired Doc Johnson

It’s the New Year, and my resolution is likely to antagonise management big time.

It’s simply this: I am not going to go into London unless I absolutely have to.

I know, I know. This column is called London Letter, but I actually live about 70km from the big smoke in a village in the countryside.

Although I have to admit that the English idea of a rural village is a bit different from South Africa, and we’re not exactly surrounded by forests or tundra.

But to be brutally honest, I hate London. It is one thing management and I disagree on.

She thinks it’s the epicentre of culture and charm, probably because the only time she goes there is to watch some fancy West End show.

I, on the other hand, work in London – or did, before the bosses closed the office and sent me home with a laptop.

So I know what it’s like firsthand.

To me London is a teeming, crowded and often rude city that had already reached its tipping point when I last lived there in 1977.

Back in those days there were multiple strikes going on, so there were few trains, sporadic electricity and even the dead weren’t being buried thanks to gravediggers downing spades. After six months, I hurried back to First World Africa.

Today there are few strikes, but it’s just as bleak to me. I hate going there outside work, even if the attractions such as the Maritime Museum are superb and you can’t help feeling the hair rise on your arms when you watch rugby at Twickenham or see the Tower of London on the banks of the Thames.

However, every time I say I dislike London, someone quips the famous Samuel Johnson line: ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’.

I have never known how to reply to that, but the other night as 2015 loomed it came to me. The good Doc Johnson said that famous sentence 250-odd years ago, when London was maybe a decent place.

Armpit challenges

In fact, if Johnson lived in London today, he may get a teeny bit disgruntled catching a tube and spending the next half hour with his nose wedged in a stranger’s armpit.

Or he may be a tad grumpy consistently getting his toes crimped by hordes of tourists dragging wheelie suitcases. Not to mention being run over by angry men in pink Lycra jumping red traffic lights on replica Tour de France bicycles.

The good doctor may also have leapt on the next horse and gone back to his birthplace in Lichfield, Staffordshire, on discovering today that a pokey, decrepit two storey apartment not much wider than a chimney will set him back more than an entire street in Norfolk.

In short, if Samuel Johnson was alive, he would probably be very tired of London.

But it is not just me saying that.

Londoners are leaving their much vaunted city faster than rats on a submerging vessel. And it’s not only hordes of grumpy oldies like me wanting to retire somewhere less frenetic and more pretty; according to government statistics, most of the people fleeing the concrete jungle in their droves are now under 40.

However, even the concept of the concrete jungle is wrong here. To rub salt in any London-phile’s wounds, these ‘refugees’ from the Big Smoke aren’t fleeing to rural idylls – they are upping sticks to other cities that have much more charm, such as Bristol, Nottingham or Newcastle.

In other words, they are debunking the myth that only London is the hothouse of culture and good restaurants. They are discovering something that I could have told them for free: that moving out of the rotten Big Apple and downsizing jobs and salaries means seriously upsizing quality of life.

So yes, I don’t like London. And no, I am not tired of life.