On the elaborate performance of solvency that keeps North London going
There is a particular skill that every North Londoner masters within their first year of residence, and it is not finding a decent flat or navigating the Northern line during a signal failure. It is the quiet, dignified art of pretending you can afford to live here at all. I have lived in this city long enough to consider myself a virtuoso of the form, and I am prepared, at last, to share my secrets.
The Performance Begins at Brunch
The first rule of pretending you can afford London is that you must never, under any circumstances, look at the bill before suggesting brunch. You suggest it breezily, as if money is a concept that happens to other people. Then you order the cheapest thing on the menu, an oat-milk something, and nurse it for two hours while your friends order the full works. This is not poverty. This is mindfulness.
I have a friend who has perfected a facial expression that suggests she simply is not hungry, deployed precisely when the waiter arrives. It has saved her, by my estimate, several thousand pounds and one minor breakdown. She is a hero of our times, and she lives in a studio flat the approximate size of a generous wardrobe.
The Geography of Affordability
Living in London on a normal income requires a sophisticated mental map of where things are cheap, a map that bears no relationship to where you actually want to be. The good pubs are unaffordable. The affordable pubs are in zones the Underground map treats as rumours. You become an expert in the precise outer boundary beyond which a pint costs less than a small mortgage payment, and you cling to that boundary like a shipwreck survivor to driftwood.
The result is that North Londoners develop fierce, irrational loyalties to specific establishments based entirely on the fact that they have not raised their prices since approximately the last Olympics. We speak of these places in hushed, reverent tones, and we guard their locations like state secrets, lest they be discovered and ruined.
The Housing Situation, Such as It Is
I will not dwell on the housing situation, because to dwell on it is to invite despair, and despair is not affordable in London either. Suffice to say that I pay an amount of rent that my parents generation would have considered the price of an actual house, for the privilege of a room in which I cannot fully extend my arms. The genuine scale of London housing costs has been documented by outlets covering the capital, and it is grimly entertaining reading, if you enjoy that sort of thing.
My landlord refers to my flat as cosy, which is estate-agent for small, which is itself a euphemism for a space in which a cat could not be swung without extensive insurance. I have made peace with it. We make peace with everything, eventually, here in the Big Smoke, because the alternative is moving to Zone 6, and we are not yet that broken.
Why We Stay
People ask me, usually people who do not live here, why on earth I stay. Why pay so much, perform so much, pretend so much, for a city that seems determined to financially destroy me. And the honest answer, the one I do not always admit, is that I love it. I love the chaos and the rudeness and the sheer impossible energy of the place. I love that I can see something extraordinary on any random Tuesday. I love that it is hard, because the hardness is somehow part of the point.
London will take your money, your patience, and a worrying amount of your dignity. But it gives something back that I have never found anywhere else, and so I stay, and I perform my solvency, and I nurse my oat-milk something, and I would not, on balance, have it any other way. Though I would, if asked, take a slight reduction in rent.
For more on London life, see the Evening Standard, transport updates from Transport for London, and cultural listings via Time Out London.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
A Confession, While We Are Being Honest
I will tell you something I have never admitted in print, which is that I once spent an entire month tracking my expenses in a spreadsheet, colour-coded, with little pie charts, in the belief that if I simply understood where my money went, I could somehow make it go further. The spreadsheet was beautiful. It was also useless, because it turned out that my money went exactly where I thought it went, which is to say, on rent and on the desperate small pleasures that make rent bearable. The pie chart was almost entirely one colour, and that colour was the colour of paying to exist in London. I deleted the spreadsheet. It had taught me nothing except that I was, in fact, broke, a thing I had already strongly suspected. There is a particular kind of London madness that makes you believe budgeting can save you, when the truth is that the numbers are simply too large and the income too small, and no amount of colour-coding will close that gap. The only real solution is to earn more, which is hard, or to leave, which is unthinkable, or to keep performing solvency until the performance becomes a kind of truth. I chose the third option, as we all do, and I do not regret it, mostly.
For more comic relief, see The Daily Mash.
