'Sometimes all that seems to stand between a Londoner and a punch-up is a grim smile,' writes Keith Ridgway
LONDON IS A COMBATIVE city, the kind of place you don't live in so much as on, hoping that it never notices you're there. But it starts to live in you, eventually. It grows into you like an odd, oily weed, infecting you, clogging up your innards, turning your lungs into sticky little pouches, diluting your skin colour down to a sickly greyed-out approximation. London stinks and screams, and so does most of its population at some point during the average day. Living here is a war of attrition, and the city will outlive us all. We pick our way through its streets and its tunnels, urban guerrillas armed with our headphones and our shoulder bags, with a supply of fresh water and a book of maps and a mobile and an Oyster card and a look in our eyes intended to ward off the looks in others'.
It's a matter of scale, of course. It's so vast, and its population so large and so varied that you soon give up the idea of getting to know it in the way that you might get to know Dublin or Manchester or Glasgow. After eight years here, vast swathes of it are completely unfamiliar to me. Certain of its layers, accessible only to the extremely wealthy or the extremely impoverished, will remain mysterious forever. Even in areas that I seem to know well, dimensions I am unaware of delineate the experience of the Londoner standing next to me. London is like Borges' Book of Sand, an infinite encyclopaedia of history, culture and human experience. I don't have the capacity to incorporate it. Nor do you. It incorporates us. We become just another page, or, more likely, just another paragraph, just another sentence. London chronicles its inhabitants, not the other way around.
It can be said of any place that it encourages to the surface those qualities or resources in us that will enable our survival. In London's case, there is an atavistic aggression that bubbles up like adrenaline. This is something it has in common with many large cities - environments where the instinct for flight is hampered by the physical geography, and the instinct for fight is closer to the surface.
That urge to carry an axe every time you leave home is in competition with other, more particularly London responses, involving civility and good humour and a surreal kind of reserve that borders on the masochistic. Sometimes all that seems to stand between a Londoner and a punch-up is a grim smile, rolled eyes and a bemused shake of the head.
It's a fine balance, a razor's edge, a very thin, very red line, and a large part of living here happily is in learning how to step back before anyone notices that you've crossed it. Every so often, you witness or hear about someone clearly overstepping the mark, taking on a mantle of rage and going various shades of berserk in a bus queue or outside the pub or, most likely, in their crushed cigarette packet of a flat - taking it out on strangers, or on family, or on themselves, or on the laconic emergency services, who tend to respond to these events either with studied casualness or an armed response unit. Most people manage to keep on the right side of a meltdown. Just.
The humour helps. London humour tends towards the dry and sarcastic, and can be very gallows indeed. The election of Boris Johnson as mayor has no other reasonable explanation.
The suspicion, always, is that things are getting worse. That more people are crossing the line, or that the line has shifted, or that the line was imaginary to begin with. It's impossible to take the pulse of a beast this big, but there are signs and statistics. There are always signs, and always statistics. How you read them probably depends on how you feel in the few streets where you live and work and conduct your business. But there is no shortage of politicians and journalists ready to read them for you, and the preponderancy of those views is darkly negative, focusing as they do on knives and guns and on the names of the dead, and on the grief of the people who loved them.
So you embark on your Tube journey with a new alertness. You scan the faces on the bus a little more carefully before you choose a seat. You cross the road. You don't catch his eye. All of which is a shame, in a way. But this is London, and it doesn't much care. It simply continues, and it fills you up, and lives in you. I'm not really sure if that's a good thing or not. But it's certainly not dull.
Keith Ridgway's Animals is published by Harper Perennial (£7.99).