I really should have started this article on London while I was physically IN London and not cruising 37000 feet above a sea of white cottony cloud as far as the eye can see, on the plane back to Brunei.
London starts to disappear from the psyche soon after the aircraft door shuts and the plane taxies down the Heathrow tarmac. Four hours into the flight, and after wolfing down prawn mayo sandwiches from Costa, the duty free shops in Heathrow begin to be a distant memory like the loose change you unsuccessfully tried to offload there. Even further from my mind are the cab rides (scary even when friendly), the department stores that sell everything from coffins to toe nails. The traffic, oh the traffic, and people- at last count 7.6 million on the taxman's books and perhaps another 2 million that slipped in due to lax border controls. London is a melting pot of sizeable proportions, and a place that is both familiar and unfamiliar.
Having studied and lived in the city in the early 90s, to me nothing much seems to have changed although a lot also certainly has. Heathrow and the arrival process is a constant; arriving in from Brunei at 6am, it's cold or really cold depending on the time of year. The drive into the city is always familiar, the early fog welcoming travellers both local and international all sitting bumper to bumper on the motorway. Most people on their way to work, while you have that familiar South East Asian traveller feeling of, "Dude, I'm wearing a winter coat"; the early onset of jet lag creeping in.
You are not really a Londoner if you take a black cab from Heathrow so 3 years in London 20 years ago certainly makes me a tourist this time round. The black cab fare from Heathrow cost me 200 Brunei. If anything has changed, the black cab fare has certainly gotten more expensive as the years go by.
There is the familiar shopping at Boots, Primark, Selfridges, Harvey Nichols and Harrods. Apparently a new haunt for Bruneians is Westfield, an hour out of London. The Bieber was just there, switching on the Christmas lights.
Though the shops really have not changed much, the shop assistants, especially at the make up counters, are increasingly from the Middle East and Eastern Europe. This matches the clientele. A majority of shoppers appeared to be from the Middle East. One spoilt young Kim Kardashian look alike stuck in my mind for threatening to fire “all the staff once I get back to Los Angeles”.
The taste of London, for me at least, is the tuna or prawn mayonnaise sandwich innit, and thanks to the Japanese restaurant I ate at one evening, sustainable fish from Cornwall.
This to me is London at its best. Civility, thought and concern still stands out as a warm trait of the tired and desensitized Londoner. What with recession, the weather, the foul air and traffic, the influx of immigration, London still manages to want to try to look after the environment, and to campaign to change our mind set on this.
While even the inventors of sashimi seem not to care about the pillaging of the oceans, the British apparently now do. I invited a dear friend of mine from Sarawak who has spent a considerable amount of time in London completing her studies in all things holistic, for dinner at a “sustainable sushi restaurant”. With the help of Google Maps, we walked (natch) to Soseki.
Soseki is Japanese restaurant that is proud that it sources its fish from sustainable and local sources. There is not a Bluefin tuna in sight. Unagi, apparently unsustainably over travelled is off the menu. Soseki is a taste of Japan right smack in the center of the City financial district, nestling under the eaves of The Gherkin (called that due to it resembling a gherkin, although I could think of another phallic nickname for it). We sat in one of the booths by the window and looked down at the people coming in and out of office buildings, huddling together every few minutes or so, for a nicotine fix.
A charming Japanese waitress by the name of Rika served us. Soseki had all the quintessential Japanese accouterments:- music, tableware, and a menu that looked like it came from ancient Japan. Indeed the décor was more Japanese than Japanese restaurants in Japan, which are either minimalistic or dramatic pastiches of European hunting lodges. Nothing terribly unfamiliar about our dinner, save for the thought of eating sushi in the most morally acceptable way. You know that the fish you are eating did not log a copious carbon footprint or is on the endangered list for that matter. Fish was specifically sourced from sustainable fisheries off the English coast. So we had monkfish, turbot and brill, tuna was yellow fin.
We ate our fill of morally impeachable sushi and sashimi and went out into the chilly evening. After a sustainable dinner, you feel like being at one with the universe, with moon and the stars. Unfortunately in London, light pollution is a problem and there is naught a star in the sky. And with this thought comes the paradox of London, a society that has pretty much raped and pillaged the earth and its natural resources and now only realizing that the fish in the ocean must be saved, and wanting to bring back the dark ages (plans are afoot to build a "dark park" a few hours out of London) so they can see the stars.
As I write the final paragraph of this article, I can see the island of Borneo coming up in the distance. In less than an hour I will be home, a home where I still feel very much safe, a home where I take for granted the blue skies, the green jungles and the starry nights. London seems very far now but I remember its lessons well, that we must start to preserve all these things folks, before we end up losing them all.
(PS. I also appreciate the irony of writing a piece on the environment while travelling long haul, but I had to go for work, and not a holiday).
@emmagoodegg
Illustration by Cuboi Art.
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