Friday, September 11, 2009

To London

The second half of the journey from the international Date Line in the southern hemisphere to the Greenwich Meridian in its town of origin was no where as pleasant as the first half. The seat was the same but the plane was chocker and at one point I doubted it was going to leave the runway at Kuala Lumpur. I was stuffed but forgot to take my melatonin and therefore wasted a very good lie flat seat by only getting a couple of hours sleep. I should travel better than this. The only really notable feature of the flight was a couple of hours flying over places I had never heard of. I regard myself as reasonably well travelled but there are thousands of square miles between the Caspian and Black Seas that are a complete mystery to me. I cannot catalogue the plethora of places with unpronounceable names containing far too many ‘K’s, ‘S’s and ‘V’s because I can remember none of them and they will effectively remain as unknown to me tomorrow as they were yesterday.

Arrived at Heathrow a bit early at the crack of dawn and my usual impression when arriving in the UK was reinforced. It’s a tatty dump. The baggage reclaim hall of Terminal Three is the worst possible advert for a country I can -imagine. A vast, dirty unorganised barn of a place that just cries out neglect. It took six attempts to get a luggage trolley that had four functioning wheels and I could have had my bags full of weapons grade plutonium for all the efficiency of the British Customs service. There was one disinterested bloke on duty to police three full flights from Asia. To be fair looking at the rest of my fellow travellers the most likely contraband would have been instant noodles.

I have now lived over half of my life outside the country of my birth. I grew up in suburban southwest London. A vast sea of pretty much identical semidetached houses that proliferated between the wars; London is surrounded by them. There are seemingly millions of the things. I went for a walk along the local High street. It is in a worse state than even the baggage hall. I recall the High Street as mixture of reputable businesses of a reasonable mix. There was a very good bookseller cum stationers, a bicycle shop, a couple of supermarkets, a Woolworths (not the food supermarket I am now used to in New Zealand), a sports shop, an electrical appliance store – all the things you would expect from a standard small town High Street.

What do we have now? We start of at the corner with the closed down and boarded up Police station. Apparently this bog standard 1930’s brick building is a listed building – God knows why, it’s hideous – so when the feds moved out it was decreed that it couldn’t be touched. So it sits on the corner empty, sporting a bit of graffiti and with weeds growing up the wheelchair access ramp. No a good start. The rest of the High Street has fared little better. A third of the street has suffered the same fate as the cop shop; empty with ‘To Let’ signs in the window that obviously didn’t appear yesterday. A further third of the businesses are Korean groceries or eateries. Nothing wrong with a bit of Korean nosh of course, but a third of a suburban British High Street? And the remaining third of the business premises? Charity shops. You can buy second hand junk to support pretty much any charity you can think of. Oh and I haven’t included the ex-Woolworths premises in the above calculation. This three or four shop frontage has been replaced by the biggest $2 shop (I believe they are called 99p shops here) I have ever seen. This, like a vast majority of New Malden business circa 2009, is not run by a bloke born in Tolworth. He sells the usual range of garbage ranging from saucepans that would melt before the porridge they contain to paintings of tigers on black velvet. Suttles the stationers has survived as have a fair collection of estate agents all with seemingly endless examples of the aforementioned 1930s bland London suburban housing stock. All of this appears to be not selling at £339,000 a pop. New Malden High Street exudes run down, depressing tattyness.

Going Up West tomorrow, principally to seek out an Apple Genius as I turned down the opportunity in Sydney a fortnight ago. He/she had better live up to his appellation as I have a couple of knotty Snow Leopard questions for him. Also might go to an O2 shop and enquire as to a prepaid data card for my iPhone.

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