London would
suffocate you in a second. The air, however, is too enjoyable. You can come up
with 239,568 short stories by just walking from Leicester Square to Charing
Cross. You can die a thousand deaths, you can think of the greatest novel never
to be written down. London does that to you.
In London, as Martin
Amis put it, “every face tells a story”. It won’t happen to you in any other
city of the world. Millions of them, black and white, from Chelsea, from Morocco,
from Saturn, talking on the phone, thinking of a way to pay off the mortgage, killing
time, clicking cameras, twatting across Fleet Street. They will walk past you
while you will eat their faces, lap them up like a hungry dog.
London liberates your
senses by shutting you down. London is your imagination. It’s not about open
spaces and open fields. You don’t need an empty house to create something new. You
need those people, and they are not stifling if they are not boring. They will
give you the sort of ideas you need. Like that girl with a cynical grin on her
face, washing her white feet in Diana’s fountain.
