Everything is awful. War, falling living standards, anthropogenic climate change. So here, in no particular order, is a list of profoundly unimportant things about being free and alive in 21st-century London that annoy me and, I hope, will come to annoy you:
Pret coffee, Old Street roundabout and emails that begin “I hope you’re well” followed by a question mark. Twitter parody accounts, undisclosed transfer fees, people calling the UK the sixth richest country in the world when they mean the sixth largest economy (our GDP per capita places us at 29th according to the World Bank).
Costume dramas, open letters, that eardrum-bursting section of track between Euston and Camden Town. Hire car pick-up (“You want a vehicle? From us?”), slowed-down indie covers of pop classics, the Tesco Express by Haggerston station.
Brand sentience, making decisions, the time after Kirsty Young left Desert Island Discs, but before I learned to love Lauren Laverne. People who don’t press the button at pedestrian crossings (even if it doesn’t make a difference), the word “solidarity” (you don’t mean it), bad restaurant chips (there’s no excuse).
Flat roofs, party conference season, lift-only Tube stations. Mid-video YouTube adverts, shouting “Come on Tim!” at Wimbledon any time after 2007, “the next station is Highgut”.
Video assistant referees, people with first names for surnames, restaurants that don’t take reservations. Autumn, plays without an intermission, when the search function is disabled on PDFs.
House numbers spelt out in letters, schedule-sending emails, my iPhone automatically turning low power mode off at 80 per cent charge. Hot chocolate, car parks, north London versus south London discourse.
West London, banter, the notion that being on mute when you’re supposed to talk, or on loud when you’re not, is still in any way amusing. Carrots, Euston mainline station, that time the Government declared that the “D” in DCMS suddenly stood for “digital”. Alliteration, the spellings of “pursue”, “vehicle” and “campaign”, people who turn read receipts off on WhatsApp (but on for iMessage). Busy roads in the middle of parks (Victoria, Hyde), Nora Ephron erasure, Twitter bios that say “Likes = bookmarks” when there is a literal bookmarks tab right there.
Friends who don’t text back. Acquaintances who text back immediately, TfL banning adverts for junk food but not those posters of people yawning. Tourists with backpacks on their chests, cyclists careering down the Regent’s Canal towpath, the continued existence of UK domestic air travel.
The hollow promise of extra cheese, baths, actors in roles where they pretend to hate their jobs. Central line feet-tappers, colourful ties for personalities, “I didn’t leave my party — it left me”.
Thank you for letting me get that off my chest. If another comes to me after print deadline, that in itself would qualify.
In other news...
Tech Billionaires are a curious new species of the super rich. Elon Musk is the most curious of the lot. Sometimes he’s the blue sky-thinking, electric car-building, future galaxy-exploring entrepreneur who will save humanity from itself. At others, he’s a tweeting narcissist.
Earlier this week, Musk tweeted that Ukraine should sue for peace but expect to lose annexed Crimea and remain neutral. His logic rested on a dubious interpretation of history, geopolitics and the 2012 Ukrainian elections. A few things have changed since then vis-a-vis Ukraine-Russia relations.
Yet even here, Musk cannot be pigeonholed as Putin’s useful idiot. His decision to grant Ukraine access to the Starlink communication system made a meaningful impact in the early days of the invasion.
I guess rich people are just like us. Sometimes ill-informed, often complicated except with better skin.
