London is a failure
09 November 2024This week I started my new job up in Manchester and while adjusting to life back in a small city I cannot help think about the last few years living in and around London. I moved there during Covid-19 lockdown as at the time it was the only realistic choice, but in terms of rebuilding my shattered life the city has been an objective failure on most counts. This makes me question whether going there in the first place was a good idea or whether it was just setting myself up for an inevitable long-term fail. London has a lot going for it but where it really fell down is somewhere for the daily working life as opposed for the weekly or so social life, the latter of which comes with its own costs.
Looked so promising
After the brief but unwelcome panic over Omicron in the run-up to Christmas the start of 2022 felt like the rebuild of my life was finally getting on track with the eventual unboxing and proper storage of things that had been in storage since early-2020 — and in that time had gone through international shipping — being a significant psychological turning-point. I was well into my next goal of getting fit and although the process of rebuilding my personal workstation was turning out to be a headache in hindsight the year was about as successful as could have reasonably been expected, although it did have its significant hiccups and a dose of family issues.
My involvement with the Ukraine-related charity called From Bristol With Love as it would turn out would be the most consequential thing of the year. I am not into all the pomp and ceremony but that does not detract from the importance of what they are doing. For me it started as just an excuse to try a bit of Wordpress website programming but it is part of a multi-pronged communications strategy which has caught the attention of people in important places, and as someone I met at that first send-off said: “this is stuff for the book we write in five years”. I just hope it is all actually over by then but fear things are going to get a lot worse.
London is in effect its own country so clearly there was plenty on offer but while this also comes with the logistics equivalent to a country, it does not require quite the same up-front planning. The high-intensity lifestyle that comes with the place is probably something I actually needed at the time.
What went wrong?
Hiking with a heavy bag on my whistle-stop overseas trip left me with a muscle injury which in hindsight was the point things had started to take a turn for the worse, and it was in the last quarter of 2022 that things were clearly not going to plan. A big part of it was train strikes disrupting the social life rebuild which in turn was aggravating my mental state that was little better than during Covid lockdown. The guy who saw me in the local medical centre admitted to me that it was policy to “only see people who had been in pain for three weeks” which to me was an indication of how much of a state of collapse the NHS was in. Having had it looked at after four weeks when it was stopping me getting work done rather than the one week when I suspected something was actually wrong is probably why it would be months before it was properly sorted out.
Looking back the middle part of 2023 involved doing a lot personal projects in a manner not far from early-2021 which were essentially about getting over unaddressed psychological issues, which by and large worked but eventually I had a serious slump in motivation and abandoned some of my more ambitious projects such as the desoldering station repair. This was probably around the time of my second overseas trip which would have been just as summer was ending and the amount of time I was spending out in the countryside meant that my own apartment being ‘home’ was being diluted with it becoming more like an over-sized bolthole for going into central London.
Motivation threshold
In 2024 being in my London apartment had become the exception rather than the norm and it was getting to the extent that at times it felt unnatural being in the place. There were plenty of unfinished personal projects lying around which I did not have the motivation to get on with and for me this lack of motivation for something that was supposed to be a hobby projected stagnation rather than the forward-looking. I really enjoyed it when I actually got going on things like the LED tile respin done but much of the time I did not have the energy and ended up either watching videos or going out into the city. This stagnation felt not far off what ultimately caused me to leave Bristol and that decision is one I already believed was absolutely the right thing to do, so I did wonder whether this place would meet the same fate.
Economics
While things did not feel as bad as Bristol had become by the time I left, it was clear that London was nevertheless going through a decline. Cut-backs by banks, big-tech, government, and people in general, had resulted in a job market that while not as bad as the one I entered as a post-doc in the aftermath of the Credit Crunch was clearly in poor shape. What drove it home was being informed of several hiring freezes in quick succession, and for every company that actually informs candidates of them there will be several more who simply ghost people. Some people have pointed out that things may seem better as I am now an experienced hire unlike back in 2010 which is a valid point but either way things are not good.
Travel stress
The afternoon before my first sortie to Manchester I met up with an old friend and the 45 minutes it took us each on public transport to arrive was not even anything special — if anything it is not far off the minimum. I was at a social event a weekend of two later and it took a full two hours to get back and that was getting lucky with a bus arriving just as I stepped out of a tube station. It could have easily been the best part of three hours. With Manchester the lack of stress due to the absence of such commutes was immediately noticeable; in fact it dawned on me that getting home from Manchester was quicker than getting home from what was almost a routine meetup.
London transport is stressful at the best of times but the number of times train drivers were going on strike was high even by London standards and when strikes start life in London stops. The problem is even when there are neither strikes nor a major incident trains are still routinely cancelled, and when summed up the unreliability of transport on top of how long it takes to get around is what ruined the social life rebuild. The London night transport network was also slow to come back and a large portion of it never did.