Have you ever experienced the unique English ennui of having recently been on holiday to the Continent? If so, you know how it goes. You jet off to see medieval French towns, sunny Spanish ports or sprawling Renaissance Italian cities. And life is just better there. Roads and rail simply work. Rubbish doesn’t litter the streets. Couples old and young stroll around in the evenings, bars and cafes bustle throughout the day, a sense of peace and conviviality reigns.
And then you go home. A cramped flight, a sleepy cab ride back to your dreary London flat. Soon you’re piled into a delayed train, pushing through rushing crowds, waiting for the lights. Slouching back out of the office into a cramped pub full of shouting men in suits for a rushed pint, before slumping onto your sofa and watching TV. Holiday’s over, life resumes.
Our depressive, sceptical Anglo brains refuse to admit the truth of the med mindset. It’s an illusion, a Mediterranean mirage. Moon-faced libertarian think tankers will wave Southern Italian unemployment stats in your face, reminding you to be thankful you live in a dynamic modern economy based on spreadsheets and Pret sandwiches. Of course you thought you were in paradise — it was August in a tourist town. What you experienced either wasn’t real, isn’t replicable here, or was not as desirable as it appeared. Take the blue pill, Neo, and forget the wine-dark seas till next summer.
But if you’re like me, you can’t quite drop a suspicion that all of this is itself a comforting fantasy. You start thinking things over. You clearly remember visiting highly economically active European cities out of season and finding them equally full of convivial little shops, bars and the joyous thrum of human life. It might be the weather, but you have an alarming suspicion that Latins are also having unfair amounts of fun in the depths of winter in Brittany and Normandy.
This is what techies like to call an “infohazard”
You’ll do your best to put these thoughts out of your head, and focus on the forthcoming British joys of car ownership and the ability to drive the kids to National Trust properties on the weekends, only for them to sneak up on you when you least expect it. One day you’ll be wandering forlornly around Clerkenwell, only to turn a corner onto Exmouth Market — and dear Lord! It’s full of young people (?) sitting outside (?) and having fun (??). Sorry this is England, you’re not supposed to be strolling down the middle of the street with your date, whilst happy faces laugh and pools of light spill out around you. British streets are meant to be windswept, full of impatient honking traffic, and populated by boarded up buildings, charity shops and a Tesco Express with a Big Issue seller outside.
There’s a peculiar lurching horror in the idea of a ruinous pleasure, a divine secret not meant to be seen by human eyes. Look upon the naked goddess and you will go blind; take that drug once and you’ll be chasing a never-to-be-repeated high for the rest of your life. It’s one thing to holiday on the island of the lotus eaters for a weekend, quite another to discover it blooming wild in an English garden. This is what techies like to call an “infohazard” — once you discover that Brits don’t have to be miserable, anti-social, cramped, delayed, stressed and overworked, there’s no going back. We choose to be unhappy. We could all be eating al fresco, taking the evening air, sipping coffees on balconies and having weekly meals with our extended families. We could have pleasant, human-centred streets, encourage small businesses, and live a more civilised pace of life. Something akin to the timeless glory of the Athenian agora is accessible by the extraordinary measure of sticking some rickety tables out on a street, like Narnia lurking at the back of an Ikea wardrobe.
So young Anglo, have a care what street you turn down, and what dreams you bring back from your travels. Don’t linger too long in the Waitrose, gazing at the Sicilian lemons and dreaming of the Med. Because it may just be gazing at you, too.
