Yes, London is a great city in many aspects. Like Johnny Rotten, I can't really relate to the glass buildings stuff they overdid. I like Foster, I lived years ago in a building designed by him, but too much bad Fosterism in the new arquitecture. The tower really looks like a dildo and Johnny's scooter helmet is spot-on. I particularly hate the hugly "Brighton's" Wheel. But it's a vibrant place.
The expensiveness was always there, but they went crazy in the late 80's. A friend of mine who passed away, suddenly went rich after he sold his appartment in London because the district he was living turned fashionable. He stopped to work with all the money and left London to live in a indian ocean island near the sea the rest of his life.
Well that was considerate; usually, they move up to the nicer parts of Scotland or out to Cornwall and Wales and the locals there have to live with their parents for the rest of their lives because they themselves can't afford to buy locally anymore.
In many ways, it's the same in Mallorca: many farms were sold off and became big gardens for foreign industrialists or estate agents... and who made the money? It isn't that easy to tell: the ex-farmers who sold were long ago outwitted by inflation and can no lpnger buy back what they thought they'd sold at a huge profit, and those of us who bought at those prices now can't sell without going broke because just like the washing machine when you are in a hurry and need to go out, the system’s ever at the wrong place on the programme. I know for a fact that all of my life I have been too late for the best deals by a regular gap of ten years. Would I have traded being ten years older in order to have been able to take advantage of the correct space/time frame that I should have occupied? Probably, yes. Better older than feeling a fish out of water most of the time, and one can’t escape the fact that if you are going to get, say, eighty years in total, then what difference does it make when you spend it? You probably get the same balance of good and bad regardless; but maybe, if you have choice, you’d get to be in synch!
I enjoyed the Johnny Rotten video, for which, thanks.
Though a far smaller place, Glasgow is just the same as London appears to be. I was last back there eight-and-a-half years ago for a funeral. I hardly knew how to drive around the city anymore: the streets have disappeared or been changed to one-ways; the compass of landmarks has vanished behind new structures or been totally turned into history. Even the local park where I used to walk the pooch for an hour twice a day, rain, sun, freezing fog or snow has altered beyond spiritual recognition. The pond where I shot pix of models in rowing boats has lost its charm and sense of calm, and last time I was there it offered all the glory and solitude of walking around a huge puddle in a city. Perhaps that’s what opening up the world to everyone does: ruins those moments of reflection, floating swans (some have been beaten to death there in recent years) and proud mums pushing high prams around the water’s edge as they point out nature to the sleeping babes. (I can vouch for the latter from memory and snapshot.) It’s all fucking gone, along with the immediate post-war boom that created so much of that one-time prosperity. Maybe that’s why wars exist: to reboot economies. The generally unrealised natural way to prolong life on Earth could well exist in just this type of human pruning: perhaps it’s why we have not quite outgrown the world’s resources – yet; perhaps that’s why, as a species, we have this built-in structure of gratuitous violence: it keeps us culled to sustainable levels.
Have a nice day.
Rob C