Though I’ve written quite a lot, surely far too much,
throughout my life – hypergraphia as befits a temporal lobe personality – it never
gets any easier. With increasing age most things take longer, and writing is no
exception. Becoming more self-critical is a handy excuse for this, as is being
more than ready to avail oneself of the endless tinkering that word processing
software encourages. Whatever the explanation, for me, these days writing takes
longer than it used to, and longer than I want or expect it to. Nor is there
any guarantee that prolonged gestation and fiddling will result in a better end
product, or even of having anything worthwhile to say.
Never mind. Today, the last day of the first six months of
the year, I completed, on schedule, what is meant to be the penultimate
revision of “An Outsider’s London”, an approximately 200-page account of a
lifetime’s provincial fascination with the world’s greatest city. I ran the
Microsoft spellchecker across the text, the shocking unfamiliarity with words
such as “Profumo”, “Carnaby”, “Belsen” and “Hockney” stoking my disdain for
this current era of parochially crass and juvenile Americanised information
technology. Be that as it may, I’m pleased to have reached this stage.
Knowing of my fondness for London, and for scribbling, over
the years several of my friends have suggested a project of this sort, unaware
that I’d planned such a thing anyway and that, indeed, I’d made an initial
attempt almost forty years ago. The original version, circa 1978, was a brave
foray into a kind of multimedia – essays, poems, drawings, maps and diagrams –
and was a thoroughly naïve, opinionated, uninformed and generally misguided
personal take on a city that I adored, but knew only superficially. A city I
loved for its complexity and variety, its senses of place and of past, its
visual appearance, its inhabitants and its infrastructures, and its role in the
British psyche. Before the theme got popularly named as such, this was an early outing
in psychogeography. Like most things I’ve attempted, it went nowhere.
The new version keeps the old title but takes a different
tack, a more chronologically autobiographical one, focusing principally on
childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. It describes how, from people I
knew, from radio and television, from books and newspapers, from paintings and
photographs and songs, and from anything that came my way, I formed impressions
and acquired information about the great city. Major components of the book
concern processes of understanding and misunderstanding, of gradual
clarification, of imagining and fantasising, of learning my way around from
maps and personal exploration, discovering the “good bits” of the city as I
perceived them to be, and subsequently using London as a focus for drawings and
paintings. Inevitably, being personal, being me, it’s a little odd in places.
While unavoidably personal and place-specific, though, “An
Outsider’s London” is an exercise in the whole business of how we begin to
understand and learn a large and complex metropolis, and of how one’s
impressions and reactions evolve and modify with age and experience, while
simultaneously the city changes too. The London I first thought about in those
distant postwar days is not the city it is today. So it’s also a book about
education and social change, about perception, about likes and dislikes in city
structure. Any realistic book about London is bound to have to face a great
many themes, and so it is with this one. What we have in “An Outsider’s London”
is a mix of autobiography, psychology and urban geography, a representation of
what one might call a “lifetime metropolitan learning curve”. I wouldn’t, of
course, call it that. I’d call it a rattling good read.
Tomorrow, the first day of the second half of the year, I shall start on the “final final” revision, knowing full well that it is unlikely to be the last, and I shall be enjoying every moment.
