Continued from Why? Part I which you can find here;
New Job
I had worked for several years in Greater London and noticed the changes that were happening around me. I found it charming but slightly odd that during the Cricket World Cup the shops of my local town would declare their allegiance to Pakistan or India by flying their countries flag outside. Charming because its always interesting to experience other cultures and see where people have come from, odd because I don’t remember seeing any England flags at all, the entire high street was a sea of foreign flags.
My new job in IT took me further into London rather than further out, and because of the hideous traffic going in that direction I was required to wake up very early and drive the 5 miles through as many rat runs as possible in order to make it in any sensible time. One of these rat runs took me through Wembley, a town famous for its football stadium. Driving through Wembley at 7am was like being in another country, with not a single white face in sight. I mention skin colour again only to demonstrate the sheer overwhelming change of culture in the area. Having seen how London was changing, and bearing in mind my observations about my brothers schooling it was clear that significant changes were ahead for my home town.
Police Presence
Something else changed for the worse during the Blair years - our interactions with the Police. I had been brought up in a Police friendly family, and remember as a child the excitement as the Bobby on the Beat dropped in occasionally for a cup of tea with my parents. With the coming of Blair however there was a change of emphasis and the start of fines for ‘poor behaviour’. Having got through my young and teenage years with absolutely no negative interactions with the Police, I now had several during a very short period of time; a fine for doing 33mph in a 30mph zone, pulled over and patronised for switching OFF my phone (that was ringing) while driving, pulled over and patronised for my tyre touching a painted mini roundabout, fined for doing 50mph in an incorrectly signposted (and empty) roadworks zone. The last one I fought in court because I was so incensed with the injustice, but the Police Officer who issued the fine didn’t bother turning up, and after wasting a full work day I had the fine withdrawn. Missing the work day cost me more than paying the fine would have. Presumably its more profitable to be out issuing fines than justifying them in court. All of this changed my formerly police friendly attitude to one of disgust and despair. Why were they policing minor crimes so heavily when violent crime was clearly increasing so quickly around us?
The Move North
With all the changes going on in London - along with the clear feeling that it was getting much less safe - I decided on the soft Southerners final and most drastic option, I moved North. Not too far North obviously - I’m not a maniac - but to a place near Northampton. Its strange the things you don’t realise when you’ve lived in one place for so long, moving to Northants taught me that it was possible to drive 5 miles in 5 minutes, something that in nearly 30 years in London had proved impossible. The second thing I noticed was that I had been carrying a weight on my shoulders the whole time I had lived in the city, and I only noticed because it had been removed by moving North.
It wasn’t all good news though, I was still working in central London and this was before the days of working from home. In order to get to work I had to endure a 45 minute car journey to the train station, followed by a 1.5hr train journey and then a 15 minutes tube journey. Each way, 5 days a week, on a good day. Any delay in any of those services and you could add at least 30 minutes. That’s 5 hours a day travelling and 8 hours of work and we won’t even mention the cost of travel. I kept this up for nearly 7 years.
Since I was a long time Londoner I had long since become normalised to acts of terrorism as the IRA had peppered the news with atrocities for many years. When I first walked to a job I had as a 15 year old I had heard a loud ‘bang’ in the distance, only to be told it was an IRA attack on RAF Stanmore Park. However while working in Central London things got a bit too close for comfort.
During the 9/11 attacks in New York we sat watching the carnage unfold from an office (of a global brand) in the very centre of London. Eventually as the towers came down we all realised that we were sitting in a potentially very dangerous target location and went home.
2005
Four years later I was still travelling to London’s St. Pancras every day for work. The train arrived slightly late (not unusual) and I walked to the entrance to the Piccadilly line underground station only to find it was closed. The time was 8.55am and I had arrived into the station around 7 minutes late.
As anyone who has used the Underground for a regular journey in London will know, you tend to get on the same door of the same carriage each day, based on where the exits are for the station you’re going to get off at. Its the easiest way of getting where you are quickly and avoiding the crowds as much as possible.
That morning, at 8.50am on the same carriage of the Piccadilly line train that I always got on, an Islamic terrorist had detonated a bomb destroying the carriage and killing and injuring commuters. If my train hadn’t arrived late, I would have been on that very carriage and almost certainly wouldn’t be writing this blog now.
However, I was a Londoner and used to this kind of thing, at the time all I knew was that the underground station was closed for some reason, and that there were police sirens going off everywhere. No big deal, not even that unusual, so I walked to work.
There are several ways you could get to Piccadilly from St Pancras, but since the roads were more crowded than usual with all the people walking or looking round for other options, I took a route I hadn’t tried before and went through Tavistock Square.
At 9.50am an Islamic terrorists bomb went off destroying a double decker bus in Tavistock Square that I had walked past perhaps 10 minutes prior.
Drugs
Back in the North things were also getting worse, we were alerted one evening to someone using a welding torch to steal the cash box from a BT Telephone within sight of our house. Reporting it to the local police - who you would have thought would be delighted with something to do - resulted in them telling us to ‘not worry about it because BT use the loss as a tax saving because it happens all the time’. They didn’t even bother giving us a crime number.
A few months after that a kid screeching his car around outside our house had the misfortune of breaking his car’s front axle in the middle of the road. He spent 45 minutes on the phone shouting and cursing at the local police to ‘do something about it’ and ‘give him a lift home at least’. While waiting for them to turn up he hid some drugs in our front garden just in case the police decided to search him. We felt like we couldn’t do anything about it; if we removed the drugs and threw them away he would be angry when he came back and could seek vengeance, if we left them there and the police found them it would look like our fault. In the end we left them alone.
That same year our Council Tax went up 8%.
Why 1.
There is a saying that I heard the other day that I would like to share at this point, it goes like this;
“One day one of your parent’s puts you down and never picks you back up.”
On the face of it this is a very sad sentence that makes you think, but what has it got to do with my story? Think about the above carefully. Neither the parent nor the child is aware at the time of this momentous event on the day that its happening. They have no clue which day is going to be the ‘last time’ and pay it no significance. They probably don’t even remember the last day they carried the child around. They don’t mark the occasion. Its part of life, individually a sad and life changing event, but completely unnoticed while its happening and paid no mind. Most people wouldn’t even have thought about that idea until they read it just now.
The relevance to my story is that this is also how Empires, Countries and Eras end. Most people don’t know the day, don’t realise it has happened and don’t really notice. We are conditioned to think of a grand war putting an end to countries or empires, or the death of kings and queens to be the end of eras but in reality its not quite that simple. Did the end of the Second Elizabethan Era happen when the Queen died, or when she was buried? Was it when King Charles was crowned, or will it be when the last post box has EIIR removed? Maybe you have an opinion on that because its a recent event, but can you tell me if the Egyptian era ended after the Old Kingdom of major pyramids fell, or after the suicide of Cleopatra in the Ptolomaic Egypt 2500 years later? Probably not.
When did England fall? Was it when the culture was subverted by evil politicians importing millions or foreigners without allowing time for the country to adjust? Was it when the country that invented Common Law decided to start fining citizens for not following orders? Was it when we started erecting ‘safety barriers’ to prevent terrorists ramming cars into innocent bystanders?
I don’t know the answer, and probably only history will tell us for sure. However in my opinion the parent has already put the child down and will never pick them back up again.
I love England and am very proud to have been born in London, however I hope the above explains my first “why”;
“Why did you leave England?”
Thanks for reading
~Z