It is a strange thing to walk the streets of London once more, hardly knowing where I am going. I get lost, I ask for directions in a neighbourhood I once lived in. This is disconcerting but in some ways easier on the mind. Memories should fade too… London town is always so much alive. The British institution that is the pub appears to be recession proof, and all appear to be full; the department stores that run along Oxford Street still appear to be rammed with girls shopping together, squealing with delight as they hold up purple feathers and luminous pink clip-on earrings, against their hair, against their cheeks.
It is the news that we should avoid, I am told by my host. She advises, that the only way to get through the day is to avoid the telly and the newspapers, where doom and gloom have swamped air time and galloped across print pages. She is quite right, and it soon occurs to me that for the past two months I have been carefully selecting the arts and culture sections of American newspapers, only being affected by recession talk in the first hand, which tends to have less drama, no matter the facts.
One could say that media-wise, the American way of coping with what is happening to the world economy is more positive, but then again positivity might just as well be written into their constitution, it’s an American thing (and yes it can get you down!). The people I met there are generally being practical, cutting back, giving up, holding on.
The English are down the pub, and they’re talking about people getting laid off – so what else are they talking about in the pub? Ah banter, much loved and much missed. It is always such a delight to sit in a drab brown corner on an uncomfortable chair and drink cool beer, while exchanging anecdotes with old friends. I wonder whether the people who struggle to survive will all leave London now that there will be less work. No one seems to have an opinion on that, perhaps there will simply be more struggling people. We conclude that it is best not to talk about the recession either.
So what on earth are we to talk about then? How is one to talk of future projects without sounding, well, silly and naïve? The general topics English punters are currently comfortable with, involve some kind of triumph for the underdog: now those men (and they always say “men”) who earned large bonuses will feel the pinch – the greedy swine! Now is a buyer’s market! Wait six more months and buy then! These have quickly become cliché exclamations; mumbled sentences to fill in the silent spaces between sips and banter, for I have come to understand that for us young(ish) folk it is hard to imagine a life less ordinary.
Over a refreshing Staropramen, I talk of the “walking fool”, a bearded man from New York who had walked across America in about seven months, and this seems to be a suitably distracting topic, and then we move on to beards and the actor Joaquin Phoenix who has grown one and is claiming to be starting a rap career, though there is strong belief that it is some sort of hoax, that he is messing around with Hollywood’s notion of fake and phoney… I see that I am carrying out the function of Hollywood, spinning yarns to entertain and distract from the ordinariness, the undesirable news; as the world economy tumbles and falls, Hollywood anticipates more demand than ever, in the face of the media obsession with doom and gloom, what better than the distractions of cinema and the zany characters who inhabit the world of faux glamour and glitz – razzle! dazzle! Hollywood, we’ve never needed you more.