Tired of London? You bet your facking cant I am!

Some powdered-wig-coiffed geezer with a name like a schlong once said, 'When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.' Now I've made no secret in these here pages of my dissatisfaction with London, and there's hardly a single one of my waking, wanking or sleeping hours that passes without some thought of quitting this town's traipsing across the old synapses of my brain; but this thought never fails to run up against, and eventually to be snuffed out by, my recollection of that geezer's quote, which I prefer to restate syllogistically, and in my own lingo, as 'London is shite for me. If there's one place in life where you can live shite-free, that place is London. Therefore, life is shite for me.' I've always wondered, in other words, in deference to this geezer, whether it might not, after all, be my fault rather than London's fault that I hate living here so much. But having lately done a bit of research on the period that quote dates from, the late 1700s, and having consequently discovered that back then London was a much smaller city than it is now, and that back then the chunk of London that I live in now, Barnet, was nothing but a kind of archipelago of tenth-tier cow-shit-exporting centres--villages they used to call them; having, I say, done this research and made these discoveries, I've come to the conclusion that the only fair means of putting the antique geezer's quote to the test, of asking myself, 'Am I tired of London?' would necessarily exclude from its purview that very chunk of London that I presently inhaibt, and would equally necessarily include only those parts of London that were actually considered to be part of London back then, viz: The City, Westminster, Soho, Chelsea, Wapping, Southwark (but not even, for example, Hackney or Bayswater), etc. And insofar as, when I force myself to summarise my own relation to these districts by means of a single pithy adjective, I never come up with anything more positively-valanced than superfluous or irrelevant or indifferent, I can only conclude that, insofar as London can be circumscribed by this eighteenth-century geezer's geographical parameters, I am tired of London, and justifiably so; I can only conclude that, insofar as that wig-sporting geezer is aware of what inner London has become during the twenty-odd decades that have elapsed since his decease, he is right about now spinning in his grave at a sufficient number of revolutions per minute to light up a town about the size of Luton. Oh, of course, our sainted (i.e., thrice-cursed) Mayor goes on and on about the so-called cultural amenities of inner London, but what do these cultural amenities amount to in the eyes of a thirty-grand-a-year, outer-borough-inhabiting working stiff such as myself? They amount to nothing more or other than a pathetic sackful of schlongs (IMOSHO, natch). Of course I know all about the Tate, the Barbican, the West-End Theatre District, the Royal Festival Hall, etc. I assure you, I got my fill of all of them courtesy of tens if not dozens of weekend field trips during my third-form-to-fifth-form school days. Now that I'm no longer a student, every single one of these grand institutions figures in my imagination simply as a ginormous, demonically inexorable wallet hoover.* And once you've factored these institutions out of the picture, as far as inner London goes, all you're (I'm) left with is a 24-7, 365-52 parade of culinary ethnic kitsch in the form of a much-over-ballyhooed succession of ridiculously overpriced restaurants. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm as much a connoisseur of ethnic kitsch as the next Stella-swilling bloke. But in my capacity as such a connoisseur, am I not at least entitled to get my money's worth? And in this capacity, am I not infinitely better served by my local Barnet restaurants than by the chichi establishments of the inner boroughs? Why should I pay 40 quid for dinner at some some over-the-hill Gerrard Street 'old-standby' of a Chinese Restaurant, when I can get a meal that's ten times better at half the price at Emchai in Barnet High Street? Why should I pay 10 quid, at some shitey curry stand at King's Cross that dares to boast that it's got 'the greatest Indian takeway west of Goa,' for fluorescent-red sweet-and-sour chicken trying shamelessly to pass itself off as CTM, when, basically for the same price, I can enjoy a first-rate sit-down Indian meal with all the fixins at Curry Paradise (which, I know, is technically in Brent, but just as the Pakistanis consider all of Kashmir as belonging to them, so I consider all of Hampstead Heath as rightfully belonging to Barnet)? Why--to stray ever so slightly or equivocally from the ethnic register--should I pay 5 quid for a pint of Stella in some trendy 'trattoria' in Islington when I can pay 3 quid for one at my local, the Sedulous Ape? In short and conclusion, let's bring old-what's-his-schlong's little bone mote up to date for the 21st century: 'When a man is tired of Barnet, he is tired of London; for there is in Barnet all that London can afford.' All hail Barnet, and fuck the other 32 boroughs (especially the inner ones, [yes, including the City]). Fuck them and all of their respective (and decidedly un-MILF-ish) mums.

*To the cunt who has the co-jones to point out to me the eye-burstingly obviously fact that many of the attractions in central London don't charge admission I ask, what, for the love of fuck, am I supposed to nosh on during my world-record-tying queue to get into one of these attractions--raw pigeon meat?