London

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I lived in London for a little over two years in the late eighties. I had many problems with my father at home and by the age of seventeen, I needed to get as far away from him as possible. I rented a room above a Methodist mission on Commericial Road, in the heart of the East End, which was, in those days, going through a kind of a transition period. Most of the big Fleet Street newspapers were transferring their facilities out to Wapping and the area was a big picket line where you could take a wander to in the small hours of the morning to read the early editions and drink hot tea. The docklands were in the middle of a huge facelift and the Yuppie generation were invading the wharfs and the old East India trading grounds, pushing the stereotypical ‘orlrite mate ow about a bag of cockney cockles?’ old Eastenders out and dispersing them over the city.

I did some work for the minister of the mission, a dodgy old preacherman known as David Sheriff who had a great dane called Sebastian that was as big as a horse. I studied Sociology and Theology with him (the preacher, not the dog. It was an official, accredited ‘A’ level course, but only in name) and he taught me how to smoke, cheat the dole system, and how to read such decidedly non-christian thinkers as Marx and Bertrand Russell (I read a story about him in a national newspaper, a few years after I left London, that reported his arrest by the police for running a brothel from the basement of the church) . My classes were a Donna Tartt-esque mixture of the divine and the debaucherous and at weekends we (a small group of just 7 students) would take the tube ‘up west’ where we drank Dubonet from the bottle, tried some strange drugs and talked to prostitutes and homeless alcoholics in Soho Square as the sun came up.

I think we are born many times in a life, and those days were one of those births; riding the underground and the newly-opened Docklands Light Railway from Shadwell to Whitechapel East or Aldgate, or down to Island Gardens to walk the tunnel beneath the Thames to Greenwich, or straight to Picadilly, Tottenham Court Road or Leicester Square at the weekends. These platforms were sinister places where you avoided eye contact with groups of cigarette-smoking, knife-carrying males and dodged foul-smelling bums and disease-ridden rats.
A cold wind sweeps through the dark tunnels, blowing old newspapers around the tracks, and late at night, when there are only a handful of shifty-looking vagrants and anonymous shadows lurking about, your footsteps echo too loudly against the damp walls.

Taipei though, God bless ‘er, is something very different. I spent last weekend in the big city, and walking the below-ground shopping mall at night, between Zhongshan and Shuanglian MRT stations was a lesson in the idiosyncratic differences in subterranean human behaviour. We don’t have any public transport to speak of here in Tainan and although I had spent a few days in Taipei eighteen months ago, I slept most of the time after the 24 hour journey from London. Back then I was in a daze so, unofficially, this was my first trip to the capital. The Tube is the arsehole of London, if you don’t count Victoria Bus Station, but on the MRT I felt like I was in some kind of monumental 1980’s generation-defining movie.
Interspersed along the narrow tunnel were groups of teenagers; not just one or two, but pack after pack, all gathered around a portable stereo. But they weren’t smoking, there were no drugs, no alcohol, no knife-weilding maniacs, no homeless mentalists, no schizophrenic loners talking to themselves, there was nothing of that threatening (but gripping) moody atmosphere that permeates every London station from Tottenham Hale to Bermondsey.
They were dancing. All of them. Some were breakdancing and body-popping while others were doing that Britney Spears-like choreographed newfangled sexually aggresive spandex routine. They all seemed to be rehearsing for some high school show or because of aspirations of fame and fortune.
Dancing I tell you.

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