I love living in London. I moved here to come to University twenty years ago and since then I've never been away for more than three weeks at a time.
One of the things that I love so much is that even with six million people living here you don't have to talk to anyone if you don't want to. I hate it when I visit friends outside of London and they tell how they've been absorbed into the local community. I do have a community of friends, but very few of them live within walking distance of my home. Many of them aren't even on the same continent. But they are people that I choose to spend time with, rather than people that I just happen to live near.
The only time I have any contact with my neighbours is when I'm working in the front garden. This morning I was cleaning the front path when a woman came out from next door. We'd never met before, but had a brief conversation. Apparently she's been living there for 18 months. We've been here for almost four years. I remember the gay couple who lived there before her (I particularly remember the screaming rows they used to have) but I can honestly say that I've never noticed this new neighbour before today.
And that's just how I like it.
Then this afternoon we watched This Year's Love. This is one of my favourite films about London. Just six people interacting with each other over a period of a few years. It's great.
Re:Loneliness
davorg on 2002-03-03T19:07:17
Although I consider thinking it's a good thing to never communicate with one's neighbours a tragedyIt's not that I never want to communicate with them. It's that I appreciate having the choice. I've been with people in smaller communities, when it takes them half an hour to do a ten minute walk because everyone they pass wants to stop and chat with them[1]. I'll probably say hello to this "new" woman when I next see her. But the people on the other side are complete nutters. Fascinating to watch from a distance - but not people who you want inviting you round for a coffe
:) [1] Of course, I can get exactly the same effect at a Perl conference - but that's a community that I've chosen to be part of.
Re:Loneliness
pudge on 2002-03-03T19:29:55
Where I grew up, Southeastern Massachusetts, this has always been the case. People often don't know their neighbors, unless they want to. In California, on the other hand, there's an unspoken obligation to know everyone around you on a first-name basis.Re:Loneliness
dws on 2002-03-03T20:32:41
In California, on the other hand, there's an unspoken obligation to know everyone around you on a first-name basis.
That may be true in parts of the state, but it is hardly true in Silicon Valley. Most of my friends here know their neighbors only well enough to wave at them when they drive past, if that.
Re:Loneliness
pudge on 2002-03-03T21:24:17
Yeah, Silicon Valley is mostly populated by people from out of state, though.;-) Re:Loneliness
Matts on 2002-03-03T20:08:07
On the flip side, it's a choice to live in that sort of village community too.;-) Re:Loneliness
FoolontheHill on 2002-03-04T16:44:41
I feel very similarly (sometimes). I rationalize my feeling thus:I think it is a case of "out of sight out of mind". By which I mean that in Oxford Street (London), there is a constant and never-ending flood of people and it is this that reminds me that I am just one of many millions of unique people and that they are all quite possibly feeling the same thing? Anywhere else it is much easier to pretend that you are the centre of your own universe because there are not lots of other people who are clearly the centre of their own universes bumping into you and quite happily existing without needing to even acknowledge you existence.
Maybe this is just a little bit like the "total perspective vortex" from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Although I would say that it is not total. So that Oxford Street effects different people in different ways depending on the strength of that person perspective of their universe. Sometimes I can walk along it and feel like I am at the centre of everything and other times excluded from everything.
Well thats how I feel sometimes.
