Pockets of calm

On living in cities

I reached the top of the hill that rises up in the corner of the cemetery and turned to look down across the gravestones towards the London skyline.

It’s not a true horizon - tree tops and the outlines of famous landmarks take giant bites out of the clouds - but, living in the city, it’s as close as I can get to the big skies I crave.

I’ve lived in London for almost 20 years - most of my adult life - but I’m not a natural city-dweller. I find the constant intrusions of noise, smells, other people and their emotions, intense and, at times, overwhelming.

I think of living in a city as being a lot like parenting small children. There is a carefully maintained pretence that the grown ups are in control but at any moment sticky fingers might tenderly stroke your cheek, or tug on your hair, breaking your attention away from your focus; siren-like voices might slice into your thoughts, shearing them into ticker-tape that flutters away on the breeze; and Big Feelings - frustration, hurt, pain, or unadulterated, irrational rage - are often shaped into burning hot balls and lobbed at your face. Parents catch these, jiggling them from hand to hand until we do the only thing we can, open our mouths wide, stuff them in, and swallow them whole. Parents are vessels for everyone else’s… stuff.

This is how living in a city feels to me. The idea I have ownership of my body, thoughts, and time is an illusion. At any moment I might be jostled, shouting or sirens can break into my thoughts, and there’s always a chance the traffic will grind to a standstill and disrupt every plan I’ve made that day. Of course there are days when none of this happens - just as there are days my children do not argue, meltdown or be anything except charming and helpful - but even those days carry an air of expectation that intrusion is inevitable and lurks around every corner, waiting to leap out the second you lower your guard.

In both parenting and city life it is helpful to expect the unexpected.

When I leave London I’m sometimes amused by how annoyed people get about (what seems to me) trivial unexpectedness - someone driving the wrong way round a car park, bins in the wrong spot on the pavement, someone wearing a hat inside a restaurant.

In a city, people not doing things exactly the way you would like them done is a minute-by-minute occurrence so we have to learn - or at least appear - to be more tolerant and less easily upset. Living in a permanent state of indignation is exhausting and inconvenient, so perhaps this slightly resentful acceptance of one another’s habits and inclinations is an act of self-preservation even if, like most acts of defence, it ends up inflicting its own unintended harms. We numb ourselves to the multiple minor inconveniences we navigate each hour, and wear masks of dead eyes and blank faces, embodying the cliche: The Unfriendly Urbanite.

Admittedly, this is not everyone’s experience of living in a city. I know enough people who thrive in the energy, love the convenience, prioritise easy access to art, culture, entertainment and employment, and who find it expansive and nourishing to share spaces with people from backgrounds completely different to their own (as a ‘mixed-heritage’ family it is the latter in particular that keeps us here).

For a long time, advocacy for these benefits of London-life made me think it was me, my attitude, that was the problem. I assumed I needed to search longer and harder and eventually I would find a key to unlock the same kind of pleasure in city life I saw other people experiencing.

Of course, I’ve now realised I was never doing anything wrong. City-life simply isn’t for me. My developing insights into how my mind works and how my body responds to its environment, alongside my growing understanding of capitalist systems and structures, have no doubt contributed to this realisation, but looking back I can see the hints were always there.

Within months of moving to London I would regularly fantasise about what it would be like to leave my house and not see a single other person, for the road that ran outside my first flat to be empty of cars and buses and sirens, and for the skies overhead to be clear of the distance rumblings of aeroplanes. Almost twenty years later, not much has changed.

Perhaps one day we will leave the sensory assaults of the city behind us and begin a new chapter of our lives amidst an abundance of stillness and quiet, but for now this is where we are. This is why I nurture pockets of calm: to sustain myself.

After the school run each day I drink my first cup of coffee while watching the birds visit the feeders outside our kitchen window. We’ve managed to attract Great Tits, Coal Tits, Blue Tits, Dunnocks, Robins, Wood Pigeons, a Greater Spotted Woodpecker and the occasional shy Wren to our feeders and the ground beneath them. A pair of Magpies regularly shout at the dog from the chimney stack, numerous pink-bellied Nuthatches swoop down from the giant Horse Chestnut that shades the front of our house, and, although I keep trying to tempt some of next door’s abundance of Goldfinches over the fence, the most beautiful bird to visit each day is a Jay. My revery is usually broken by the arrival of chattering green Parakeets, bully-invaders released from a cage some time ago that now rule the roosts in much of South London, who I have to chase off the feeders before they gobble everything up. The calm ends and it’s time to get to my desk.

At the end of each day The Great Tidy begins. In an effort to maintain some degree of order in our house I plug myself into podcasts or audiobooks as I clear kitchen worktops, empty and refill the dishwasher, cook meals, fold laundry, hang out more, and complete any one of a dozen necessary but boring domestic chores. Their crushing mundanity is transformed into something I look forward to thanks to the voices in my ears imparting the news, history, politics, social and cultural commentary, or an occasional helping of true crime.

Whatever the weather, my socially-awkward whippet and I frequent the quietest corners of South London’s green spaces each day. We avoid people by entering hidden quadrangles behind tennis courts, wading through winter quagmires to far corners of playing fields, and wandering amongst gravestones. I do my best to notice the season’s offerings - the cold snap of the wind in Winter, the bird song in Spring, the buzzing of insects in Summer, the golds and burnt ochres of Autumn - and my mind quiets.

I gently mock myself for missing these moments of calm when they are out of reach - as they have been this holiday (which is probably why I’ve ended up writing this) -seeing in my attachment to their rhythms and routines the early signs of an elder rigidity that I’d like to avoid. But I also love them.

They sustain me, resource me, give me space to think and bring order to my days.

They are reliable, steady, and predictable, everything we’re not supposed to want in the fast pace of modern, consumption-obsessed, ‘success’ fixated, society.

They are everything living in a city is not.