Guy Rundle: View from the underside

Every year, there are two stories that make an appearance in the wacky news columns of the papers. The first is of the proverbial British family, emigrating to Australia, imagining it to be some suburban-bush mix of Skippy and Neighbours. Arriving in the boiling canyons of Sydney, driving through Chinatown and decaying inner city warehouses, they take one look at the reality of their colonial vanilla dream and get on the first plane home. The other story is slightly different. It’s of the Australian couple who arrive on an early morning flight at Heathrow, engage a taxi for the day, do the Tower, Tussaud’s, Harrods, and make it back for the evening flight home. They actively didn’t want to see anything that would disturb the fantasy of ye olde Englande.

For Australians, until fairly recently, Britain could still be summed up by tea towel images. While Britons were fed both a soapy, white-bread fantasy of Oz and the no less distorting vision of professional antipodeans such as Clive James and Germaine Greer (metropolitan London intellectuals who thought that occasional visits back home could top up their 1950s and 60s memories of the place), so the Australian imagination of a crumbling old imperial city couldn’t encompass the real intensity of the furious, global, modernising capital that London has become.

Read the rest of the article.

The sites of London: no. 23

Most evenings it's now customary to see the floor of a bus paved with one or other of London's afternoon free-sheets. I picked up over a dozen copies of thelondonpaper on the 214 last night. I doubt TfL or its contractors are bothering (able?) to recycle all the newsprint that is discarded on London's tubes, buses and streets every night.

Even the people who read them think these papers are worthless trash.

The sounds of London: no 22

I was walking past a building site yesterday and overheard an Australian chippie trying to explain the rules of cricket to two of his Polish co-workers who didn't have a clue but were doing their best to sound interested. It used to be it was just Aussies and Kiwis who came to London to earn a few quid on building sites. Not any more.

Considering how rubbish the cricket world cup has been I could fully understand the lack of interest amongst the Poles. And the Australians are going to win again and are already gloating about it, so no-one else gives a shit anymore.

A mild winter

The second snowfall of the winter today. There was about 3 inches (10cm in new money) overnight and it’s still coming down heavily now (at 11.30am). Until today all the talk has been about how this is the mildest winter on record - which it has been.

Getting into work this morning was a nightmare. It took me nearly 2 hours to get to work I didn’t leave home till 9, knowing that things would be mental. (It’s usually a 45-minute journey by public transport or 35 by bike).

It’s amazing how nothing works properly at the merest sniff of bad weather in this country. Schools are shut, transport has largely ground to a halt, even the tube, which is (mostly) underground, isn't working properly.

Out the back window.

New Zealand studies

Getting the most out of your degree? If not, then perhaps this might be the thing for you.

Birkbeck College at the University of London now has a Centre for New Zealand Studies. The centre opens today, Waitangi Day (New Zealand’s national day).

Strange to think that a country of just 4 million people warrants an academic centre of its own.