When a man is tired of London ...

We can normally rely on Dr Johnson to hit the aphoristic nail on the head, but I feel increasingly unsure about his assertion that a man who is tired of London is tired of life.

Mrs Hann and I spent the weekend there, and on Saturday evening I felt a tsunami of weariness engulf me as we struggled to make our way through the vacant, drugged and drunken multinational hordes occupying every square inch of pavement around Leicester Square.

I have never seen the place busier, nor more detached from the life of the rest of the country.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War Evelyn Waugh was already complaining that London was no longer an English city.

By the time I took my mother there in 1985, for her first visit since 1922, she was memorably observing that even the few people on our river boat who looked like they might be British were all “jabbering away in foreign”.

Today we have an undeniably vibrant, crowded, international city with a soaraway property market fuelled by City bonuses, and no detectable signs of recession, while a rather depressed little country bobs along, dinghy-like, in its wake.

We went to London to see an operetta. It was a sophisticated metropolitan take on Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. Which meant, naturally enough, that it featured goosestepping Nazis and an excess of totally uncalled-for undressing and sexual innuendo.

I had a fair inkling of this because I had read the reviews in the national newspapers and all had been totally derisive, with the sole exception of the Daily Express. Which was small consolation, given that the Express is known for opera criticism in much the same way that the Chief Rabbi is always my first port of call when I want an informed opinion on pork sausages.

I have learned, over the years, to pay only limited attention to reviewers because I have often been pleasantly surprised by shows they have slammed, and disappointed when those they have raved about have failed to live up to my heightened expectations.

However, this one proved even grimmer than billed, which was saying something. Transforming the comic gaoler Frosch into an epileptic, sadistic, psychopath in SS uniform was the supreme masterstroke, for which the director frankly deserved not to be merely booed, but slapped.

Christopher Alden is his name, by the way. My heart sank as soon as I realised that the production was by the same man who not so long ago reset Britten’s delightful A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a grim and inevitably paedophile-dominated inner city boys’ school.

This relentless search for uncalled-for novelty truly depresses me. A recent reviewer of the Royal Opera’s well-worn but still marvellous production of Puccini’s Turandot could find no fault with singing, playing or staging, but still felt compelled to mark it down because it had “nothing new to say”.
Of course it didn’t, you idiot. Any more than Stonehenge or the Cheviot Hills have anything new to say, either. Their beauty is timeless, or at least it will be until some greedy chancer dumps a clump of whacking great wind turbines in their midst.

All, no doubt, to fund the sort of hedonistic urban lifestyles so much in evidence around Covent Garden and Soho at the weekend.

Increasingly I feel that we don’t need a high-speed rail link to suck yet more life out of the provinces into the maw of what William Cobbett presciently called The Great Wen. We need a latter-day Hadrian to knock up a socking great wall to protect the rest of England from this ghastly metropolitan contagion.

Labour endlessly lambast the Tories as “out of touch” but the reality is that all our political leaders are equally out of touch because they live in the London bubble of prosperity, where traditional standards count for little and novelty is valued above all.

Despite my advanced years, I have young children to keep up my overall interest in life. But I’m sorry, Samuel. It’s a wrench to break with you after all these years but it has to be said: when a man is tired of London in 2013, he is absolutely right.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.