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| special mayday 2005 |
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WHY LIVING IN LONDON?
The most expensive city in Europe but the most exciting to live too. How to bear with this contradiction handling a banana.
| Luca Acquarelli (LONDON). What does a banana cost in London? It depends on the areas and on the owner of the shop. From 15 Pence of Tooting Brodway corner shop or Brick Lane Market to 1£ of Charing Cross Station shop. They are the same bananas, Del Monte type. The banana will wait on the bag for some hours before being peeled and eaten inside a library, a work place, on the branch of the Victoria line, walking on the street to meet friends, or during the trailers in a cinema on the third floor of a building.
Living in London is very expensive and not only for the cost of bananas, but also and first of all for the way to get to the bananashop. Here you have the hardest working urban underground of Europe, but forget about the crazy prices: unaffordable for most of the low-medium income people of the city who choose the bus in daily sweating hours of anxious time thinking in how late they’re going to be at the appointment. And where are you going to date? In the most part of the pubs you can risk to afford just a glass of water and having a very watered meeting. And forget about having it at home, because your room is tiny as a closet and your American kitchen is an acrobatic attempt of make the dinner comfortable. But how can you cope with all that and still enjoy your banana and this unbearable city? Because you fill exaggeratedly excited and, like a drunken man, you can write poems even on a back of a shop in the middle of Starbucks rotting sandwich. In London you learn to become masochist and you experiment a sort of super-adrenalinic body who can enjoy extraordinary experiences. And the city is ready for that: you can have averything at any time. Books, exhibitions, movies, cinemas, parties, all types of vices. Still looking at your empty pockets and don’t feel desperate (like George Orwell wrote).
Don’t worry, please, you’ll find a job (temporary as usual) and you can learn to exploit the potential of your credit card. Until a day of distraint of your properties, leaving you a rotten banana and an unachieved London dream.
| write to the author: la@work-out.org