The Dark Streets of London

I have never liked London.

There is a pervasive 'darkness' about it for me - 'dark' in a moral or metaphysical sense, as in Blake's "dark Satanic mills"; something so soul-sappingly oppressive that even the brightest weather cannot pierce my inner gloom.

And we haven't had much bright weather these last few days. It's been damp and grey. My memories of London in Autumn and Winter, and much of the Spring, are that it's always damp and grey.

And the wind has more knives in it than in any other place I've been. Hell, I've survived a winter in Toronto, and the wind can be pretty cruel there. I've been in places where the temperature regularly gets down to -20 or -30 C. London, rarely falling below freezing, always seems much worse somehow. The wind and the damp collaborate, insinuating the chill deep down into your bones until you feel you could never get warm again, even on the sunniest beach in The Maldives.

I have a particularly acute experience of this because most of the time I've spent in London, as a law student and later, I've been pretty near penniless, and have thus had to fill my time by wandering the streets for hours on end, gazing forlornly into shop windows and reading restaurant menus for sustenance. During such blank and cheerless days, I was often reminded of one of my favourite Pogues' songs, 'The Dark Streets of London', from their debut album 'Red Roses For Me' (more than twenty years after I first fell in love with it, this is still the album most likely to reduce me to floods of inexplicable tears):

Now the Winter comes down
I can't stand the chill
That comes to the streets around Christmas time
I'm buggered to damnation
And I haven't got a penny
To wander the dark streets of London

All of those memories come washing over me as I walk the streets now. I haven't been so depressed in years. I am desperate to get back 'home'.