And there are times when it’s not so nice. Places like this bus stop or a Tube train, where there are other people standing or sitting around observing the encounter – and, I always feel, resenting it – are among the worst. I can’t escape the feeling that these observers think I’ve actively done something to make a stir or scene. It’s as if they think that recognition in others’ eyes is something that emanates from me, that I’m deliberately beaming it out. Essentially that, just by being there, I’m showing off.
I was once walking back down my road from the supermarket, carrying several heavy bags of shopping and therefore feeling slightly exposed – like a squirrel looking for somewhere to bury a huge nut. There’s definitely something about carrying food that, on a deep evolutionary level, makes me feel defensive. I’m sure I’m not alone. Try catching the eye of someone returning from a buffet with a heaped plate: you’ll see the shade of a Neanderthal, furtively dragging a mammoth carcass into his cave.
There was a small group of blokes on a corner. I think maybe they were builders or decorators, or perhaps they were planning a robbery. I’d be surprised to discover they were opposing counsel in a fraud case having a discreet chat during a recess, but who knows. Anyway, one of them said something like:
‘Oi, there’s that bloke off the telly!’
They all turned to look at me and I turned to look at them. We weren’t that close to each other but I smiled and, as far as was possible with an arm weighed down by beer and ready meals, I waved. A beat passed.
‘Twat!’ one of them shouted.
I carried on walking home, feeling very much like a twat. Look at the twat who eats! There’s that twat off the telly all weighed down with groceries – what a lame bastard!
Now, that was a very atypical encounter in one way – people are seldom rude. But typical in another. It made me feel very exposed and visible. It reminded me that all the things people normally do anonymously in a big city, in my case might have to be done while being observed and made to represent the innate twattiness of all mankind.
But even when strangers are very pleasant, I find it impossible to respond unselfconsciously. From the moment someone says ‘Excuse me’, I’m thinking about how I’m coming across. Do I seem like a nice person? Or do I seem annoyed? Or do I seem like a nice person who’s rightly annoyed at being asked for a photo/autograph/to say hi to their friend’s voicemail under these awkward circumstances? Or do I seem like a nice person who’s rightly thrilled? Or a horrible person who’s wrongly thrilled? Or a horrible person who’s wrongly annoyed? Or a nice normal person who’s understandably surprised but the reality of whose goodwill shines through?
Sometimes I walk away buoyed up by the enthusiasm of someone who’s said I’m funny. Other times I’m fretting about the embarrassing awkwardness of the encounter. But I almost always wish I’d been nicer or ‘more genuine’ – that the warmth I attempt to display didn’t feel so forced. I can’t avoid the conclusion that really nice people don’t keep asking themselves if they seem nice. Smug bastards.
So I cross the road and walk north-east up the south-west side of Quex Road, past the junction with Mutrix and past a school on the corner with Abbey Road. I don’t like the look of this school. It looks like a primary school. I don’t like primary schools. It’s also a modern building and, if we must have primary schools, I’d rather they weren’t in modern buildings.
There’s a bit in a Sherlock Holmes story where Holmes and Watson are coming back into London past Clapham Junction and Holmes says: ‘It’s a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high and allow you to look down upon the houses like this.’
I agree with Holmes, it is. Watson didn’t, as he tells the reader: ‘I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough’ – I suppose the Battersea area wasn’t so gentrified in those days.
But Holmes is admiring something specific: ‘Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea.’
‘The board-schools.’
‘Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.’
When you travel into London on any of those raised lines, you can still see exactly what Holmes meant. At that time (this story was published in 1893) London itself was a fairly new phenomenon, the modern metropolis, the largest city there had ever been, Ripper London, a terrifying, blackened, smog-ridden, lawless place, a horrific vision of humanity’s future lit by the guttering flames of coal gas: teeming, impoverished, disease-ridden millions crammed into a place of crime and death.
Until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, the life expectancy of those in urban areas was vastly lower than that of country-dwellers. Cities were very fertile breeding grounds for disease. But they were just as welcoming to business and industry as they were to bacteria. So people were drawn to the cities to get jobs, and went in the knowledge that they might consequently die. The commercial draw of the capital more than compensated for the deaths it caused, so London’s population rose despite them. It was a bath with the plug out that was nevertheless filling up.
We rightly associate Victorian times with that sort of chaotic urban squalor. But we should also credit the people of that era with solving the problem. In the middle of the century, everything seemed to be getting worse: larger, more crowded, more inhabited yet less inhabitable. And, basically, they sorted it out. With sewers, epidemiology and schools. They coped with London’s uncontrollable growth and they found magnificence in it. They taught the world that urban living could work; they showed it how. Frightening though the giant city must still have seemed – much more so than even my Cagney and Lacey-inspired vision of 1980s New York – Holmes, or rather Conan Doyle, spotted that by the 1890s things were moving decisively in the right direction and celebrated the fact.
However irrelevant, discredited or penurious Britain becomes, London will always have been the first modern city, the place where the method of life now favoured by most of mankind was devised. And the Victorian schools, the old board schools, are a symbol of that – a symbol of hope and pragmatism delivered in brick. It’s inspiring that there are so many of them and that lots of them are still schools. (I get a bit depressed when I see one that’s been converted into flats.) That’s why I’m so proud to live here. London, more than any other city on earth, is the new Rome – so much so that Rome is in some ways just the old London.
So I make an exception for primary schools in Victorian buildings but, in general, I view them with distaste.
It’s just a feeling. I don’t want anything to be done about it. I know we need to have primary schools. I know some of them will have to be in modern buildings and that, broadly, that’s a good sign as it suggests that money is being invested in education. So I’m not against this school I’m walking past, any more than I’m against sewage plants. And by making that comparison, I don’t mean to liken children to sewage. But, as with a sewage plant, when I pass a primary school I acknowledge that it’s an important facility without being particularly pleased to see it.
I wonder why. Is it because, despite the jolly colourful classrooms, the evidence of fun projects and well-motivated teachers, we all know what they really are: the means by which we introduce infants to the idea that their time is no longer their own? For your whole life, primary school is teaching them, you will have to go somewhere every day and obey other people’s instructions. Today, painting or nature table, to lure you in. In twenty years’ time: the company accounts, a Cornish pasty production line or an OHP presentation on ‘Corporate Goals Going Forward’.
Or is it just because I hated primary school? I absolutely did. At the age of four I started to attend Napier House, the primary day school section of Headington