Leaving London
A note of farewell
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‘And I cannot make it cohere’ - Ezra Pound, Canto 116
Today, on October 1st 2023, I am leaving London after ten years in the city. I don’t want to give some dramatic impression that I’m say tapping out these words while on a sealed train to Moscow or the like; I scheduled it a week ago and am probably doing nothing more dramatic this instant than attempting to find my passport.
But still, it’s a moment, and one I feel almost dutybound to write a little something about. Uniquely, this is the first time in my life I’ve moved place – I’m off to Brussels 🇧🇪 – without really wanting to; I don’t have the sense as when leaving Berlin for London in 2013 and even more so leaving Oxford for Berlin in 2005 that I was very much done with the place I’m departing from. How can you be done with London, really? Someone must have said something about a love of London representing affection for existence itself.
I’m moving for work. While my efforts at learning languages and training as an interpreter have finally paid off, the central mission with which I headed to London a decade ago, to establish myself as a writer and comedian, is left unfulfilled.
As I’ve written about elsewhere, my time in London is to some extent synonymous with my 30s, and I’ve also long been clear that it’s a city which doesn’t particularly care who comes or goes. London is to be loved like your children, without hoping for anything back. That is of course a tricky attitude to cultivate without resentment.
Nonetheless, it remains the case that the last few years in this city have seen me feel settled like nowhere ever before; pottering around the local shops, getting unduly excited about events at our local library, running around the local parks. I also, in the fulfilment of every young boy’s dream, live opposite a train station. Choo choo! What I say about London below needs to be put in the context of my exceptional good fortune of owning a slice of a property in one of the wealthiest cities in the world1.
I appreciate being settled all the more due to the harshness of my early years in London. I was horrendously broke after I moved back from Germany, living really day-to-day, with an abiding memory of sitting on long bus journeys reading discarded copies of the Evening Standard or Metro on the way to a date or meeting with a friend. The London I came back to in those years felt a harsh place but also richer than the city does now; it was the mid-years of Cameron and Osborne, and hard decisions being taken, and there was a cruelty in the rhetoric regarded society’s poorest in a way that particularly struck me after the hippy-inflected tones of German public life.
As I began to perform comedy again there were many more bus journeys and an endless changing of trains at Highbury and Islington. Years passed drinking glasses of tap water in back rooms of pubs, waiting two hours to do five minutes to a room of mainly other acts. I used to host a three hour show in Gospel Oak for £10 and a pint. In that early phase, I had the feeling that I was chipping away at an enormous wall, working and work to expose myself to a little sunlight and dislodge the tiniest piece. And each week of gigging and applying brought only the smallest additional chink of light.
Ironically one of my best opportunities came early in those years, reaching the semi-finals of a comedy competition purely on the strength of my Berlin comedy footage. Yet in the semi-finals, my material not worked through enough with English crowds, I flopped horribly, meeting an intoxicated wall of indifference. I was the worst-received act of the night. Over these years it became clear that, the odd nice gig aside, my deciding that it was time for me to move to London to make it in comedy did not make it a fait accompli.