South Riding 18: Wood Green

I have had a number of discussions with people who don't like London and can always understand their point of view. They cite noise, pollution, traffic, too many people, griminess, aggression, lack of vistas, litter, lack of community and interactions -any number of things. None can be denied as the bad is inextricably tangled with the good; so I say “yes but” and point out the beauty of the view from Waterloo Bridge, buildings, history, institutions, the higgledy piggledy excitement, the variety. They respond with a “yes but” of their own and so it goes - getting nowhere. There is no right or wrong only a viewpoint but when someone doesn't like somewhere, bad is all they see and dark overwhelms the light.

I can retort by saying (as I do now when I looking at my old home) “well I enjoyed living here” but it is not an argument, it is a simple statement. I would never stoop to using the Doctor Johnson quote: “when a man is tired of London he is tired of life” not only because it is too cheap a cliché but because taken by itself, it is bollocks. It is perfectly possible to feel the claustrophobia of rush hour, long for mountains and and open space and have a great zest for life. However I might use the second part of that quote because it is far more interesting: “for there is in London all that life can afford”.

When living in Wood Green I fully appreciated the value of the diversity. Within a short distance there were all sorts of local shops, serving different communities; as if the rest of the world was just round the corner. At the time this was an enormous boon because we were changing our diet away from traditional meat based English cooking, and the supermarkets did not then stock the variety of squashes, pulses, vegetables, and spices we now take for granted. Because of where we lived we could find almost everything and freely experiment with recipes from around the world.

Changing your diet is not easy because it is an intellectual choice initially at odds with your habits and instincts. The years have accustomed you to a pattern which you think of as a natural way of eating and established scales of tastiness by which you judge and crave food. Breaking that pattern needs a lot of conscious attention and thought about recipes. We talked about food in a way we hadn't done before. For sure we had always been interested in cooking and eating but it is different when you need to establish a totally new balanced diet.

The impetus came from a realisation that methods of intensive agriculture meant that our relationship was seriously out of whack (Intensive piggeries and battery chickens are just wrong) and we were also influenced by reading 'Diary for a Small Planet' and thoughts that an excessively meat based diet was not sustainable. Although our philosophical position was actually no different to that of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstalll, we became vegetarian. When we lived here though we knew we were on the soft end of the scale. The person in the flat below was a Buddhist and therefore very strict, whilst the next door was a squat of animal rights activists who would have no truck with any animal product whatsoever and could barely walk in the garden for fear of treading on some small creature.

That's the thing about living in a place like this: you never know who you might meet. For example our Buddhist neighbour was a musician and there were a number of other musicians nearby: a hidden enclaves or network. I like this idea. In any average looking street there can be an interesting mix of people. From the outside though you would never know

As Dr Johnson said somewhere in London you can find all that life can afford.