City life is real life · 2002-05-01
I am a creature of the city centre. An indication of this condition, as any fox hunter will tell you, is a certain propensity for intolerance of ‘country folk’. However, I would go further: I am intolerant of suburbanites too. And I believe I have a solid case on both counts.
Rural dwellers, to commence, get a good deal in this country. Everyone knows that most farmers are simply failed businessmen whose ample wages are paid by the EU. Yet when their failed enterprise manages – as in recent years – to compound its own inefficiency with disease epidemics, farmers expect a further bailout from the Treasury. It’s not just farmers, though. All rural dwellers get an artificially good deal from the society they live in, because the services they require in order to live comfortably – postal delivery, all utilities – are provided to them at the same prices as town dwellers, by law. Perhaps that is just as well as there are precious few other reasons to stay in the countryside. Unless of course you aspire to live in a home called ‘Thistle Cottage’, to have porcelain ducks on your mantelpiece, to be able to savour the sweet aroma of pigshit and silage in the morning, to step in cowpats, and to have no escape from the full misery of the British weather except by retiring to Thistle Cottage to watch daytime TV.
It is possible to argue that suburbanites are coddled too, though perhaps this is simply because they have a habit of voting governments in and out of power – ever mindful of the implications for their tax bill. Occasionally this power is not enough for them, and the suburbanites get militant. Lorry drivers and cabbies were at the vanguard of the fuel protests, a kind of peasants’ revolt of the selfish lower middle class. Still, the burghers of Bromley and Basildon can only be envied so much for their affluence. After all, what passes for entertainment in these parts is a round of bowling followed by a trip to Brewer’s Fayre. In the mornings the suburban kids are ferried to school inside Volvo armoured personnel carriers, in case the big bad world should make its sinister influence felt. On Sunday afternoons paunchy men in comfort-fit jeans can be spotted washing their Astras or trimming their hedges. The rest of the time, curtain-twitching neighbours have nothing to look at, because nothing happens.
Who wouldn’t rather live in town? – right in the dirty, noisy, dangerous centre of things. Clearly it’s much more convenient: you can walk anywhere in 10 minutes. Indeed you can nip out for a carton of milk while dinner’s cooking in the reasonable certainty that the flat won’t have time to burn down. Of course, on your way you’ll have to put up with the suburbanites’ exhaust fumes and noise as they queue in their own traffic to get home from work in their empty Volvos and Astras. However, this toxic cloud has a silver lining as it enables you to feel smugly self-righteous that by living in the town centre you’re being a good, energy-efficient citizen. You can also reassure yourself that as well as a conscience, you have better taste. The highest achievement of rural fashion is the Barbour jacket; suburbanites prefer garishly coloured fleeces. Clearly not all urban people are sophisticates draped elegantly in the latest creations from Milan or even FCUK. But more of them are.
The real reason you’d want to live here, however, is far simpler. Cities are civilised. You can live your own life, anonymously, sociably, however you choose. The urban socioscape is the motor of every decent, tolerant, liberal society. The full diversity of human life lives in the inner city. It is possible to speculate endlessly who dwells nextdoor or above or below you – and, if you so choose, to see comfortably into the kitchens of at least ten different households from your window (twenty with binoculars). My neighbours in Edinburgh have so far included (alongside the run-of-the-mill students) a dodgy-dealing car mechanic, a boisterous Italian matron and a bunch of nightclub bouncers whose flat has been successfully converted into a giant bassbox. I love them all.
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