How Do You Treat People With Mental Health Problems? Aoife Mannix on Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December: Chapter Two, part four
April 4, 2013

In A Week in December, Gabriel goes to visit his brother Adam in Glendale mental hospital.  Faulks gives us a potent image of what it is to suffer from long term mental difficulties.  ‘At one window was Violet, as she had been every time that Gabriel had ever visited, a thin, hunchbacked old woman, her skirt folded over at the waistband to keep it up, who stood gazing out into the darkness with her right arm raised in permanent greeting – or possibly farewell.’  This reminded me of Stevie Smith’s deeply moving poem ‘Not Waving But Drowning.’  It seems to capture the paralysing quality of mental illness, of being trapped by problems of the mind.

While we have moved from the dark days of the past when so-called lunatics were left to rot in asylums that were more like prisons, there is still a great deal of fear and suspicion in dealing with those who suffer from difficulties with their mental health.  We still like to distance ourselves from ‘the mad’, to pretend that they are somehow alien creatures with no connection to the humanity of ordinary life.  This is perhaps because we want to believe that such disturbing loss of perspective could never happen to us.  When the truth is that roughly a quarter of us will suffer from a mental health condition at some point in our lives.  We are far more prepared to accept that everyone will experience sickness of the body than to admit how many will experience sickness of the mind.

Because Faulks makes Adam Gabriel’s brother, we see his illness from the point of view of someone who knows and loves him.  Gabriel neither distances himself nor patronises his older brother.  Instead he has attempted to understand the private mythology that makes up Adam’s schizophrenic world.  ‘When he was with Adam, Gabriel behaved towards him as though there was nothing wrong.  There were a number of reasons for this.  He thought Adam might appreciate it, might prefer not being talked down to or addressed as though insane.  It made Gabriel feel better, too, as though the tragedy was contained and his brother was not ruined, wrecked.  And how else was he supposed to carry on, in any case?  What better form of speech might there be than the normal and respectful?’

Gabriel’s insistence on still treating his brother like a person is perhaps not as common as it should be.   Often those with mental health difficulties are talked to as if they were small children or animals or just not engaged with at all.  A few years ago I ran a writers’ group at Sutton Mental Health Drop In Centre.  I remember one man saying to me when I admired his piece of writing, ‘Thanks, that’s really good to hear.  You know I haven’t spoken to a single person in five days.’  I recall another man declaring cheerfully, ‘I’m really up for writing this morning.  I’d a very good night last night; I didn’t hear any voices at all.’  He then went on to describe how exhausting and confusing the voices were; how he had spent years in a hospital because the voices became so demanding he was unable to hear anything else.  It made me realise that mental illness is a battle that many people are fighting and often it takes considerable courage for them just to venture outside their front door.  They deserve our sympathy and support; not just to be labelled as somehow no longer human beings in their own right.  Have you or someone you care about felt judged because of mental health difficulties?

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What do your books say about you? Aoife Mannix on Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December: Chapter Two, part 3, Monday, December 17
March 26, 2013

Jenni Fortune, tube driving heroine of A Week In December, is surprised to discover that her lawyer Gabriel Northwood doesn’t only have law books on the shelves of his office.  It appears he’s obsessed with Balzac and reads poetry.  Jenni herself loves to read and has eclectic taste.  She consumes serious literature alongside chick lit romances.  In fact she’ll read anything that allows her to disappear into another world.

Jenni’s love of books doesn’t come from a good education as Faulks describes her school as more about crowd control than literacy.  Of course many of us are switched on to books by an inspiring teacher or librarian who steers us in the right direction.  Yet there are also those who like Jenni have made their ‘own path into literature.’  Who first got you interested in reading or did you discover books by yourself?  For me, it was my mother.  She gave me Jane Eyre to read when I was ten.  I thought the first bit in the horrible orphanage was brilliant because Jane was the same age as me.  However I didn’t really appreciate the tragedy of her romance till I reread the book in my twenties after my mother’s death.  My mother was always keen for me to read the books that she loved as soon as possible.  It was only when she died that I fully appreciated that most of the books I’d read in my life up to that point were on her recommendation.  A deep love of literature was a great gift that she passed on to me.

Though I’m reading A Week in December on my ipad kindle, I still love owning a large collection of books. When I recently moved house, someone suggested that it might be time for a bit of a clear out.  I reacted with horror, for me the solution is to build more shelves not ditch my books.  ‘But you’re not going to read them all again, are you?’ they asked. Well of course not, especially when I’ve got so many that I haven’t even reached yet.  I just like having them round me as if they contain a little bit of me at the time I read them.

Though there are a couple I always come back to.  Sometimes if I’m feeling a bit low, I take out James and the Giant Peach and reread the bit about the two horrible aunts being squashed by the peach at the beginning.  Cheers me right up!  Are there passages in books that you return to time and time again? What book would you most want your children to read?

In A Week in December, Faulks uses love of reading as a way to sew the seeds of romance between two characters who on the surface appear to have little in common.  Jenni and Gabriel are first drawn to each other because they are curious that the other reads books.  Have you ever scanned the shelves of a new date to see what they reveal about them?

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What’s in a name? Aoife Mannix on Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December: Chapter Two, Monday, December 17
March 12, 2013

Jenni Fortune, the tube driving heroine of A Week in December, appreciates it when her solicitor Gabriel puts a pause before her surname.  She feels she is being put on trial when his boss Eustace Hutton, QC, fails to do so.  ‘Take a seat, Miss Fortune.’  Given that poor Jenni is to be interrogated about a young man throwing himself in front of her train, her second name really is unfortunate.  Like Dickens before him, Faulks clearly enjoys naming his characters to reveal something of their circumstances or personality.  Is it a coincidence that Eustace Hutton reminds me of the infamous Hutton inquiry into the death of David Kelly?  Kelly allegedly killed himself after leaking claims to the BBC that the Blair government ‘sexed up’ a report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.   His suicide remains highly controversial as only last year a group of doctors were outraged when their demands for a new inquest were turned down.

This connects nicely with the scene in chapter two where a group of would be Islamic terrorists choose code names to make their identities seem more English.  Ravi, a Hindu convert to Islam, becomes Gary after a Leicester footballer.  Hassan, who grew up in Glasgow, picks Jock saying ‘If I’m going to die, I’d like to take that name down with me.’ Despite his earnestness and ambition to be a suicide bomber, Hassan is not without a sense of humour.  He suggests that Hanif, a bald, thickset bloke from Watford, calls himself Elton.  ‘Hassan had a sudden and terrible desire to laugh – at the thought of roly-poly Elton John with his diamante glasses and his boyfriend and his platform heels having unwittingly given his name to a solemn would-be terrorist.’  Whether poor old Elton John would actually find this funny is beside the point.  Faulks’s dark humour lies in showing how names, whether appropriate or absurd, help to create bridges between the world of the reader and the world of the characters.  Even when those worlds may be very far apart.

Then there is the villain of the book, John Veals.  Not perhaps since Scrooge has there been a character as money obsessed and amoral in his outlook.  His plot to bring down ARB involves destroying the life savings of thousands of elderly people.  Veal is of course meat from a new born calf who is taken from his mother shortly after birth and tied to the ground to prevent the development of muscle tissue through movement.  You don’t have to be a vegetarian to find this cruel but it works to create expensive, tender meat.  And it’s not illegal.  A suitably symbolic name for a man who finds ‘The distinction between ‘legal’ and ‘ethical’ was of no concern to him – or to anyone he’d ever met.’

Veals himself enjoys a bit of code naming when he calls his latest ‘sensitive’ trade ‘Rheumatism’  ‘in view of all the pension business.’  Veals’s cynicism is breath taking and the vivid description of how he conducts his business decidedly chilling.  If you were thinking of a name for the ultimate bad guy, what would it be?  How important do you think character naming is to successful writing?

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What’s the distinction between legal and ethical? Aoife Mannix on Sebastian Faulks’ A Week in December Ch 2
February 27, 2013

In another great novel set in London, George Orwell famously created in 1984 the character of Big Brother, a dictator obsessed with controlling his citizens every move.  Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction for by 2004, Big Brother was in its fifth TV series and on our streets CCTV cameras filmed nearly every corner of the city.  Perhaps we weren’t living in the dark dystopia George Orwell imagined but shades of what he feared certainly continue to haunt us in twisted, subtle ways that would make poor Orwell turn over in his grave.

In A Week in December, Faulks’ hedge fund manager, John Veals, is no dictator.  He conducts his business in the ‘discreetly drab town’ of Pfaffikon and likes to stay hidden in the shadows.  Yet as Faulks describes the extraordinary reach of Veals’s power, we realise that he is perhaps more sinister than Orwell’s Big Brother.  For example by operating in the margins of the law, but not actually breaking it, Veals has successfully made a huge fortune out of exploiting the debts of poverty stricken African nations. His use of ‘consultants’ which include the finance ministers of ex-communist states as well as an attaché to the British Embassy means that he has influence and inside information on political situations all over the globe.  His latest plan is not merely to bring down a government but the entire banking system itself.  He doesn’t care if Africans starve or pensioners lose their life savings or the British economy is brought to its knees with the resulting inevitable widespread job loss and poverty.  He has no conscience and he has no morals.  Yet he has a certain lack of hypocrisy that is chilling as he points out the false morality of others.  ‘Most people he had met in his life in finance were essentially law –abiding.  For many of them the lack of regulation meant that they didn’t need to break the law to make surreal amounts of money.  There was also, he’d discovered, a snobbery about being honest: people who believed themselves to be unusually gifted were proud of the fact that they could make millions in a legal way.’  The implication is that as long as you stay just inside the law, you don’t have to feel guilty about how many lives you ruin.

Does the world of finance lack an understanding that legal doesn’t necessarily mean ethical?  Is Faulks right in saying that those people who brought about the current economic crisis have no trouble sleeping at night?  Faulks argues that while Veals may be an extreme portrayal, he is by no means alone.  Veals particularly admires a senior director who gleefully tells him how he personally made over 80 million pounds and didn’t pay a penny’s worth of tax.  Something to think about next time you’re having a cup of coffee on a London street corner.   For despite the economic meltdown that followed the banking crisis and the seemingly endless fines for banking scandals, there has been a noticeable lack of any actual criminal prosecutions.  Even Kweku Adoboli,  the trader who recently went to jail for seven years for losing over 1.5 billion pounds of his bank’s money, insisted he was just behaving how his employers expected him to.  The ‘only following orders’ defence didn’t work for him but has it worked for countless others who take no responsibility for actions that appear to be sanctioned from above?

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Does reality still exist in 21st century London? Aoife Mannix on Sebastian Faulks’ A Week in December, Chapter 1 part 3
February 13, 2013

Jenni Fortune, the heroine of A Week In December, is in reality a London tube driver.  This is a job that involves wearing ultra practical rubber soles and shuttling through dark tunnels all day.  It’s gritty, manual work which she enjoys despite the lack of glamour.  Yet for all her down to earthiness, Jenni is also obsessed with the online fantasy world of Parallax.  Here she has an alter ego called Miranda who works as a beauty therapist and is an amalgamation of various gorgeous celebrities.  Parallax is like the real world only better.  It’s not heaven exactly because even if Miranda has a beautiful house on the banks of the Orinoco, Jenni had to take out a virtual mortgage to get it.  Parallax has its own economy; what makes it completely unreal is that this is a world where builders finish the job a week early!  Perhaps this is the appeal, it’s not so far from day to day life and yet it’s stripped of its frustrations and ugliness.  Is this a harmless bit of diversion for a single woman who’s had her heart broken in the past?  Or does this fantasy world stop Jenni from living her real life?  She’s excited about her virtual first date with a guy who carries a machine gun but he doesn’t exactly sound like marriage material!

Yet the economy of Parallax seems fairly benign compared to the unreality of John Veals’s economics as he plots to bring down Allied Royal Bank.  Veals’s attitude to the real life pensioners who will lose their life savings if he succeeds is the same cold detachment he feels for the tourists he observes on the tube.  ‘What false picture of a city did these people have? Veals wondered.  Their London was a virtual one… Since his own reality derived from numbers on a computer terminal, he thought it wise to keep an eye on flesh and blood; there might still be something he could profitably learn from them.’  It’s an attitude that is completely lacking in empathy.  Veals is only interested in money and other human beings are a means to that end.

This lack of empathy is echoed in the reality TV show It’s Madness watched by Veals’s teenage son Finn.  Here contestants with mental health problems are judged by a panel of experts and the viewing public.  It’s like a combination of X Factor and Big Brother with the ritual humiliation of those suffering from mental illness treated as wonderful ingredients for comedy.  Finn lives in his own drug induced reality smoking skunk in his den a million miles from his parents even if they live in the same house.  But what kind of reality does this kind of television actually represent?  Like Parallax, there are elements of real lives involving real people but they are warped and twisted to make what passes for entertainment.  Finn believes that ‘beneath the knockabout surface, the programme got to grips with important issues.  Its premium-rate phone lines allowed the public to interact democratically, their opinions counting every bit as much as those of the ‘self-proclaimed experts.’  Do reality TV shows offer an insight into reality?  Are they an example of democracy in action?  Or a sign that we are losing our grip on the real world?

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Are Critics the Scum of the Earth? Aoife Mannix on Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December Chapter 1 part 2
January 29, 2013

Gore Vidal famously confessed ‘every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.’  This would seem to sum up the life philosophy of R. Tranter, Faulks’s portrayal of an embittered critic.  A writer himself, Tranter cannot bear to see other writers succeed.  ‘Reading praise for the work of a British contemporary gave him a stomach pain as fierce as the cramps of gastroenteritis.’  What he enjoys is failure and he views his role as critic as taking a giant pin to any writer’s bubble of self confidence.  He’s not content with just ripping apart their text; he takes pride in undermining their entire artistic and personal integrity.  Tranter’s reviews are so nasty and vicious that his editor is forced to tone them down.  Tranter then writes anonymous versions that allow him to vent the full force of his spleen.  But are critics in general motivated mainly by jealousy and resentment?  Or do they have a useful role to play?

Tranter sets himself up as an expert who tears of the emperor’s new clothes of others’ pretensions to talent.  Yet Faulks implies that really what Tranter is best suited to is correcting the grammar in teachers’ school reports rather than offering any real insight into literary works.  Even the book club of ‘a group of posh housewives in North Park’ don’t listen to him for very long.  ‘What they wanted to talk about was whether the incidents in the book were ‘based on’ events in the author’s own life and to what extent his version of them tallied with their own experience of such things.’  Is it wrong to judge a book by how ‘real’ it seems?  How much does knowing about the author’s own life contribute to understanding their fiction?

Faulks is clearly having a bit of fun in criticising the critics. Rather like comedian Tim Minchin’s hilarious ‘The Song for Phil Daoust’ which sums up what many artists feel about those who give them bad reviews.  But Faulks is also raising the more serious issue of what it means to pass judgement on the lives of others.  In the character of Hassan al-Rashid, Faulks portrays an angry young man who condemns the loss of religious faith of the ‘kafirs’ around him on the London tube.  He has nothing but contempt for his fellow passengers and believes that he can see through their hypocrisy and pretensions.  ‘The conviction that the rest of the world lived in a dream was one that grew in Hassan each day.’  But Hassan is not content to express his criticism through idle words; he is on his way to buy bomb parts.  Like Tranter, he has no sympathy for his victims. But seen through the eyes of Shahla, the young woman who loves him, we discover that Hassan is not merely a heartless terrorist.  He’s a damaged individual whose passionate convictions are taking him down a murderous path.  To believe that you are absolutely right and everyone else is absolutely wrong is a very dangerous way of thinking.  Perhaps when we judge other people, we should look more closely as to what those judgements say about our own insecurities.

Have you ever felt traumatised by harsh criticism or received a horrible review?  Have you ever felt justified in being a harsh critic or regretted going too far?

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Who Would You Invite To Dinner? Aoife Mannix on Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December: Chapter One, Sunday, December 16
January 11, 2013

In the first chapter of Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December, Sophie Topping is drawing up a list of dinner guests.  It’s clear the aim is not to invite round some old mates for a bit of a piss up and a laugh.  Rather it’s to show off her husband’s connections.  As a newly elected MP, Lance Topping needs to impress the party leader with the importance of the people he knows.  Is it still true that in 21^st century Britain who you know counts for more than what you know?

Faulks humourously implies that Lance’s Sunday dedication to his new job is a bit of an act.  ‘Sophie wasn’t sure how he could concentrate on constituency paperwork with the football blasting out from the television in the corner and she suspected that he sometimes nodded off to the excited yet soporific commentary.  For fear of discovering him slumped with his mouth open, she always knocked before taking in his tea.’

His wife is certainly putting a lot more effort into this dinner party than Lance is.  Sophie’s proposed table plan gives us a wry insight into her rather pretentious, social climbing way of viewing humanity as well as a handy intro to some of the characters in the novel.

My favourite I think is the description of Polish footballer Tadeusz ‘Spike’ Borowski.  ‘Lance had met him when his team were turning on some Christmas street lights and had taken a liking to him.  He thought it would make them look modern to have Spike there.  But did he speak English?  Would he behave?  What did footballers like to do after dinner?  ‘Dogging,’ was it, or ‘spit-roasting’? She wasn’t quite sure what either of these things was.’

Sophie’s awful snobbery and casual racism are made funny by her ignorance of lurid sexual acts.  The joke is definitely on her and I’m very much looking forward to meeting Spike.

Yet this first chapter is not all about taking the piss out of dinner parties.  One of the most intriguing characters is not on Sophie’s guest list.  This is Jenni Fortune, a young female tube driver who is threatened with being sued after a man unsuccessfully attempts suicide by throwing himself in front of her train.  When I first emigrated to London from Dublin, I remember being horrified to discover what the expression ‘man on line’ actually meant.  I once eavesdropped on some businessmen complaining about their train being delayed by ‘some selfish suicidal idiot.’  I couldn’t get over their total lack of compassion for someone who’d been driven to such a desperate act.  All they seemed to care about was that they were going to be late.

Then a couple of months ago, I listened to an interview on the radio with a tube driver who had had a young man kill himself by jumping in front of the train he was driving.  He described going to the inquest and meeting the family who had lost their son to suicide.  It was clearly a deeply traumatic experience for him and though logically he knew there was nothing he could have done, he still suffered from feelings of guilt.  His sorrow and empathy for this stranger he’d tragically killed was deeply moving.   How would you cope with such a random, yet uniquely London, experience?

It seems to me that in this first chapter, Faulks is not just setting up his city characters but posing deep questions about what the values of 21^st century Londoners really are.  If you could invite anyone at all, living or dead, to your fantasy dinner party who would it be and why?

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Is This Town Haunted? Aoife Mannix on London’s creepy streets
October 28, 2012

That time of year is nearly upon us when vampires, zombies, witches, and ghosts once more roam the streets desperately searching for a good time in the party capital of the undead.  The pubs are swinging with cardboard pumpkins and every club is offering special nights from the ‘Satan’s Rout Halloween Ball’ at the Coronet to the ‘Big Ten Inch Voodoo Halloween’ at the Book Club.  But is it all just a good excuse to dress up and trick’r’treat or is there something genuinely scary about London?

I’m currently reading W G Sebald’s Austerlitz, the story of an architectural historian who has a breakdown when he starts to remember how he escaped Prague as a small child on one of the Kindertransport to London at the beginning of World War II.  It is not in any sense a traditional ghost story but it is deeply haunting.  Sebald writes about how Austerlitz spends hours at night trying to cure his insomnia by wandering the streets of London.  He often feels that he is not entirely alone.  ‘The hospital for the insane and other destitute persons which has gone down in history under the name of Bedlam also belonged to the priory outside Bishopsgate.  Whenever I was in the station, said Austerlitz, I kept almost obsessively trying to imagine – through the ever-changing maze of walls – the location in that huge space of the rooms where the asylum inmates were confined, and I often wondered whether the pain and suffering accumulated on this site over the centuries had ever really ebbed away, or whether they might not still, as I sometimes thought when I felt a cold breath of air on my forehead, be sensed as we pass through them on our way through the station halls and up and down the flights of steps.’

This very much echoes another writer fascinated by the connections between ghosts and mental health.  Charles Dickens’s famous essay ‘Night Walks’ vividly describes what he called his ‘houselessness’, a compulsion to roam the streets at night haunted by inner demons and the city itself.  He wrote ‘But the river had an awful look, the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went down. The wild moon and clouds were as restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed, and the very shadow of the immensity of London seemed to lie oppressively upon the river.’  Though the Charles Dickens museum itself is closed for refurbishment, you can still experience London’s literary ghostliness by taking part in their Dickensian London walks every Wednesday.

It may have been because of his own mental torments that Dickens was fascinated by visiting asylums and that he wrote so passionately about the mistreatment of the inmates.  I’ve been running writing workshops with Cooltan Arts, the Southwark based arts-in-mental health charity, as part of their ‘The Dickens News’ project with the Dickens Museum, Southwark News, The Cuming Museum, Southwark Cathedral and Morley Gallery.  Inspired by the Pickwick Papers, they’re creating their own newspaper and exhibition.  It’s chilling and fascinating to hear about the barbarity of restraint procedures and the ease with which families could commit their relatives, particularly women, to these grim institutions of Dickensian London.

Whether you believe in ghosts or not, it’s hard not to be haunted by the power of London’s past.  What do you find creepy about London?  What’s your favourite London ghost story?

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The Dickens News exhibition runs at the Cuming Museum from October 25^th to November 29^th 2012

Are You Super Human? Aoife Mannix on celebrating the extraordinary
September 26, 2012

Even though the Paralympics are sadly over, I still have Public Enemy’s ‘Harder Than You Think’ going round in my head.  Particularly the line ‘thank you for letting us be ourselves.’  Maybe because it reminded me of something an American friend once told me years ago.  She said, ‘I didn’t feel like I fitted in anywhere in particular till I moved to London and it’s not so much that I fit in here as that London is like who cares about fitting in?  I stopped feeling like I had to conform to being like everybody else, that maybe being my own person was more important.’

For me, the Paralympics had all the same thrills and excitement that the Olympics did in terms of seeing athletes push themselves to their absolute physical and mental limits.  But what made it even more compelling was this sense of pride in being different.  We live in a world where TV and media are constantly bombarding us with clichéd images of what we’re supposed to look like.  Mainly white, blond, ultra-thin, and air brushed within an inch of our lives.  Excessive use of Botox means that some of the celebrities we’re meant to emulate haven’t even got their own smiles anymore! The message is not ‘be yourself’, the message is strip yourself of all individuality so that you’re a clone copy of some image that exists nowhere in the real world.

A few years ago I was commissioned to write a poem for the Wellcome Collection as part of a series on body image.  I was inspired by the Changing Faces website where young people discussed the reality of living with disfigurement.  Amidst the horror of the ignorance, prejudice and bullying these young people experienced was an incredible sense of strength and courage that shone through.  Perhaps this was precisely because they were being forced to look deep in themselves to see who they really were rather than passively accept what society said they should be.

The Wellcome Collection’s current Superhuman exhibition examines the history of human enhancement.  It asks compelling questions for the future of humanity like if plastic surgery was free, would we all look the same?  Yet it also celebrates how human beings have used technology to overcome bodily limitations.  In what the London Evening Standard described as ‘the battle of the blade runners’, who watching Jonnie Peacock win gold in the T44 men’s 100 metres event could fail to be inspired by his incredible performance and the technology that made it possible?

As the Wellcome Collection exhibition makes clear, dreams of being superhuman are not new.  From ancient myths and legends to the hippest 21^st century graphic novels and comic book heroes, people have always been fascinated by the idea of pushing their bodies beyond what is thought to be physically achievable.  If you had a super power what would it be?  Did the Paralympics make you believe in the super human?

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Superhuman runs at the Wellcome Collection until October 16^th 2012

Are You Proud To Be A Londoner? Aoife Mannix on surviving the Olympics
August 24, 2012

London has been a bit weird of late.  Strangers smiling and chatting to each other.  Children on the streets at night clutching one eyed aliens.  Signs everywhere in pink.  An extraordinary sense of excitement and happiness in the air.  Who would have thought a load of people running round in shorts could generate so much emotion?  Certainly not me who didn’t even know what handball was or have the faintest clue about the rules of Judo yet found myself instantly addicted to the Olympics.  Now I’m looking to the Paralympics to save me from having to go cold turkey.

Already though there’s a slight anxiety that once it’s all over, we’ll go back to being miserable and ignoring each other apart from the occasional grumble about the rain.  But could it be that we’ve had this pride in London all along?  Let’s face it, Londoners love to complain.  Before the Olympics, we all seemed convinced that if terrorists didn’t blow the city sky high, we’d grind to a complete stand still as public transportation imploded.  Perhaps, ironically, the man who did the most to cure us of this habitual pessimism was Mitt Romney.  In a cultural faux pas of extraordinary ignorance, he dared to try to tell us that we weren’t ready.  Maybe he’d listened to everyone else complaining and saw no reason not to join in.  But perhaps London is more like a family than anyone ever suspected.  We can moan and slag off our siblings to our heart’s content but watch out anyone else who tries it.  So when some Yank comes over and starts mouthing off about how his Olympics were better than ours, suddenly it’s okay to admit to loving London.  Like some annoying kid brother we spend most of the time trying to ignore but if anyone seriously tried to hurt them, we’d rip their throat out.

In Craig Taylor’s Londoners, many of the interviewees describe their intense relationship with the capital.  A lot of what they have to say is highly critical and refreshingly unsentimental.  There’s the city planning officer who thinks that London is essentially unplannable but its ‘greatest attribute is that it has the best free sex in the world.  That’s why the youngsters come to London.’  The personal trainer who believes his gym only deals with symptoms when what people need is a complete lifestyle change who says ‘I think we all get trapped in London life.’  The currency trader who describes the misery and loneliness of arriving from Pakistan to end up slaving in a fried chicken shop before finally realising his dream of working in the city.  ‘I had started a new life, doing what I really love: so many digits flashing on so many screens.’

Perhaps my favourite one that I’ve read so far is the Portuguese grief counsellor who explains the pain of those who lost loved ones in the 7/7 bombings.  She describes how she narrowly missed a car bomb herself.  ‘I remember saying, ‘How funny.  Can you imagine, the project director is bombed to death in a terrorist attack? The Mail would have had a field day.’  We just thought it was hilarious, and just then some people walk into the office.  We’re cracking up laughing and they say, is this the bereavement service?  They expect us to be always sitting there in mourning.  But it’s completely the opposite, because if you didn’t laugh your head off you’d be crying your head off.’

Maybe come the winter as the cold and the recession settle back into our bones, Londoners will have lost their smiley enthusiasm.  But I think we’ll still have our gallows sense of humour and the great stories of survival.  My current favourite being the eight year old boy who arrived in London from war torn Somalia and grew up to win two Olympic gold medals.  What was your favourite Olympic moment?  What makes you proud to be a Londoner?

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