4 minute read
BARTLEBY
Long live urban life
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I’m writing this on my phone, outside a tent, looking out towards the island of Skomer. The weather is classically Welsh, the air almost as damp as the sea and the sky a restful grey. We’ve been here two weeks and during that time I’ve sort of managed to work without access to Wi-Fi or electricity. A Zoom meeting had to be abandoned when a gust of wind blew the awning down and it’s been hard to resist suggestions of a swim/ice cream/beer. On the whole, though, I’ve functioned pretty well off-grid, less hotdesking than not-desking.
Which begs the question – could we do this all the time? I don’t necessarily mean camp all the time, although a friend’s bell tent equipped with a wood-burner is warmer than our house. I mean escape the city and find a little place by the sea. Swim with dolphins. Canoe to the shops. Sing with the seals. All that jazz…
Why not? Well the first problem is that we’re a year too late. Every single seaside doer-upper south of Dundee has been snaffled by Londoners who seem to have developed a mass aversion to their city and are fleeing in droves. A colleague who lives near Hastings told me he gets as many as five people a day stopping by to ask whether he’d like to sell his house. In a world where even I can type 10 words a minute on a phone, nobody needs to be anywhere particular. Consequently everyone wants to be somewhere they’re not.
Which brings me to the second problem. I was brought up in the country, admittedly north Lincolnshire rather than East Sussex, but still somewhere you could wake up to birdsong rather than the sound of a youthful neighbour banging with increasing desperation on his front door because he lost his keys in the Uber home. There was a conker tree across the road and a corner shop two miles away. A teenage journey into Lincoln, 20 miles distant, required meticulous planning as the station was next door to said corner shop and the train ran three or four times a day. I once sat on a platform staring vacantly over the fields for two hours before remembering that there were no trains on Saturday afternoons.
The pubs closer to home were to be approached warily. In one, a friend and I asked a group of lads around the pool table if the rule was ‘winner stays on’. No, they replied, it’s ‘we stay on.’ We left, but not before I spent a precious pound putting Bucks Fizz on the jukebox seven times in a row (please Google if you weren’t around in the 1980s). I’m far from being the only person who gravitated to Bristol from some village in the sticks. As our prime minister would attest, the word ‘civilisation’ derives from the Latin ‘civitas’, or city, and Bristol, whatever its faults, is a civilised place. A teenager living here has the freedom of the city, which is compact enough to navigate by bike or scooter. For people of all generations there are libraries and football clubs, theatres and even a surfing pool with artificially generated waves.
When Covid struck I had the strange sensation of being transported back into the past, to a time and place where there were few people to see and precious little to do. Following on the heels of Brexit, successive lockdowns made me realise how fragile civilisation can be – and how important it is to live in the city, suffering the minor inconveniences of noisy neighbours and parking spaces that are just too small, in return for the benefits of urban life.
The dog has been sat in the car all day. He loves the seaside with a passion but he’s ready to go home. By the time you read this I’ll be back at my desk, with the hum of the city all around. ■
THE BRISTOL
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