The Metropolis

@ThoughtCatalog gets London badly, badly wrong

Mike Pollitt | Thursday 21 June, 2012 10:44

Thought Catalog is a popular website with twentysomethings across the US and UK. It publishes articles such as How You Know You’re About To Have Terrible Sex and Things I Wish People Told Me When I Entered My 20s and The 3 People To Fear At Your Unpaid Internship

It’s popular because it focusses on the one subject that matters to today’s twentysomethings more than any other: themselves.

Yesterday they published What it feels like to live in London by Rosie McCap, an American “currently residing in New York City”. It’s a fascinating insight to how newcomers to a city can manage to get almost everything about it hideously, appallingly wrong. Here are some of the things Rosie thinks you’ll feel if you live in London. My gloss in italics:

“Reveling in your ex-patriotism, you will start drinking tea instead of coffee, root for Manchester United, listen to BBC Radio 1 and become an avid watcher of Doctor Who.”

When I live in New York I’m going to support the Los Angeles Dodgers

“In a smoky pub around the corner from your flat, you’ll play darts with old men whose teeth are missing but whose minds are as sharp as a tack.”

Ah those gummy old pub sages – haven’t we all enjoyed the benefit of their toothless wisdom?

“Up-and-coming designers will sell you their fashions from boutique shops on Brick Lane; you’ll get the rest of your clothing from vintage stores somewhere outside the city limits.”

I get my boxer shorts from a vintage boutique in Rickmansworth

“There will be a tattoo of the Union Jack above your hip, or maybe you’ll get your eyebrow pierced in Camden.”

Maybe I will, Rosie. Maybe I will

“You’ll meet British men who are repulsed by your foreign accent…Once they’ve gotten to know you, they will like you, and even fall in love with you. They will treat you like gold. They will take you for a weekend of surfing in Cornwall, and if they love you, they will take you to Paris, or Greece.”

Haven’t been taken to Paris or Greece recently? Your relationship is a husk

Let’s get straight past the annoyance of the “you wills”. That’s just an affectation of style. Simply replace them with “I dids” and the meaning of the post becomes clear.

What’s amazing about this post is that someone can come to London expecting life to be just like Notting Hill or Love Actually, and learn through bitter experience that daily life is exactly like…Notting Hill or Love Actually!

It isn’t. This isn’t what London’s really like. People don’t actually live in this ridiculous, sentimentalised fairy land of “smoky pubs” and “up-and-coming designer clothes”. The post is called “What it feels like to live in London”. Rosie may have felt like this during her stay. But here’s a lesson my generation doesn’t really want to hear: just because you feel something doesn’t mean it’s real.

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