What They Don't Tell You About Living in London

A lot of friends and family contact me saying they are living vicariously through my London adventures, particularly through my Facebook updates. Thing is, Facebook is a carefully edited medium which affords us an easy way to project how awesome we are, whilst we hide those not so fabulous aspects of our lives.

 

In the wise words of Sir Laurence Street (former Chief Justice of the NSW Supreme Court) from my days at law school - there are always two sides to the coin. For the record, Sir Street's was a 50 cent piece and at 80+ he flirted like he was Gosling with us 20-somethings.

I love you dearly and thank you for your support, but I say to you this – put down your smart phone and book yourself...wait, don't put the phone down...book yourself a ticket to that place you've always wanted to go…and then put the phone down. That's exactly what I did and is how I ended up here.

As I approach the nine month mark of life in London, something has also gestated - an inner rage. Before I go on, I do love my life in London and the happy times I promote (via Facebook), which certainly outweigh the frustratingly, annoying, inefficient, extortionate times. But they’re there, and daily I find myself in situations where I want to scream what the actual fuck?! Somedays I do...in public...mostly at rail employees. And I use the term ‘employee’ loosely as it implies that they do something productive and as it stands I am not convinced.

It is never far from my mind that I am one of hundreds of thousands of Aussies who have taken this right of passage to the UK, but at 32 I seem to be a late bloomer. I am beginning to wonder whether my age is impacting on my experience. Having been around the block a few more times than my younger antipodeans, it really grates me when I see things that are over complicated, inefficient and expensive and I know they don't have to be. So indulge me here and allow me to vent a few things that shit me to tears (bearing in mind this list is by no means exhaustive), and what no one warned me about London. 

Passiveness

People are passive, not necessarily aggressively, but I often experience resistance to engagement, initiative or responsibility.  I work within the public sector and not surprisingly I see these things a lot at work, but this most prevalent on public transport. Catching the train/tube during peak hour is best described as ‘intimate’. People seem to have a preference for being squashed together in the vestibule rather than move inside the carriage!

When this Aussie attempts to get on and politely requests my co-commuters to utilise that space behind them I receive looks like I've just asked them to insert a toilet brush somewhere unmentionable, brush head first. I did once get a verbal response; ‘there's no room’. ‘There right behind you oh wait here where I am now standing’, having pushed past her not so delicately. It really doesn't make for the best start to the day.

TV Licences 

I'm not going to bang on about this one too much because it blows my mind. Instead I want to skim over this to keep my levels of irritability down as I'm only at number 2.

In a nutshell there is no free to air television channels in the UK like there are in Australia. Instead you have to pay a licence fee of £145.50 (cheaper for black and white) each year. Apparently the fee funds the BBC.  For numerous reasons, which I won't go into here, I find this hard to swallow but I think I should point out that the BBC is a globally recognised brand and I suspect it's doing alright for itself. Incidental to my research I found reading that website amusing because I never knew there was so many ways to say ‘you're being ripped off!’

Public Transport

Original image by Arjen Stilklik via Flickr

A lot of people bang on about how great the transport links are in London. Hey, even I did at first. But there is nothing that wears me down more than the daily commute, and where I can, I walk. I shouldn't really call it public because the national rail service, which connects London with the surrounding home counties (one being Surrey where I currently reside) is run by several private operators. In my experience they couldn't care less or charge more, but then again prices have just increased.

I just paid £255 (around $460 AU) for a monthly ticket for a journey the equivalent of living in the outer western suburbs of Sydney. I wouldn't mind paying so much if it was a good service (I refer you to my Zurich piece), but it not. It's like waiting for that friend who doesn't give a crap about time and is either late or cancels last minute. This happens so often that train boards have the scheduled time and expected time. Sometimes they match, but it’s so rare it feels like you’ve won some kind of lottery when it does happen.

When in London, buses are my preferred mode of transport as they are cheaper and tend to be more reliable. But, is it really reasonable to assume that the destination you read on the front of the bus is ultimately where it will end up? Apparently not. ‘This bus is on diversion. Please wait for further announcements,’ has caught me a few times, usually in the post-midnight hours. It means that the bus will not be finishing the route and you need to get off at the next stop and wait for the next bus to come along, which doesn't always eventuate.

Wages Versus Cost of Living

I am lucky to be earning around what I was in Sydney, and I know how fortunate that makes me. Most people I know earn less than the equivalent to $50k (AU), which may sound okay but the basic costs of living London are expensive. A habit I am finding hard to let go of, but know I must, is converting prices of things into Aussie dollars. It's hard not to get annoyed when the shampoo I use here is £17 (I have a sensitive scalp) and would be $17 in Australia. This has made me realise how ridiculous the concept of money really is.

The Weather

Actually, no, I’m not going to bitch and moan about the weather. Not only because I can't say I wasn’t warned, but because I actually love the cold. In fact, I could whinge that it's not cold enough, but I'll let that go for now as apparently it's been unseasonably warm this year. Either that or it’s my piping hot temper that's taken the edge off.

-Eliza Rose Harper