There are some very beautiful places in London. There are amazing parks and woodlands and lakes. It is not all the hustle and bustle of a city. Yet there is always some kind of solitude about the place. I realise this solitude is caused by silence. Of course these places are never truly silent. One can always hear the sound of birds, cars, trains, dogs etc. But the silence that always hits me hard is the silence of the people here. I always find it reassuring to listen hard and always be able to hear at least a couple of people talking but here I hear nothing. In the busy centre of London, this is not much different. You can always hear people talking but you can never understand what they are saying for their conversations are so intimate and self-centered that only those two people can hear them. They ignore the constant movement of life around them and talk to that one person as if nothing matters more to them. In this way, any one who walks past them can not and must not hear what they are saying. It is their duty and our duty to ignore one another and so now you can maybe understand why this ‘non-silence’ in the industrial places of London is just as unbearable as the silence in the green lands of London.
The landscape in London varies quite dramatically. In the centre of London, there are tall, booming, grey skylines which are constantly changing and increasing. The buildings seem almost threatening; vast monsters that are ever ready to swallow up the next money-obsessed human who walks through their open jaws. I feel almost sorry for those people who work constantly in the offices of London, gobbled up at dawn, chewed up and then spat out at dusk. The brilliant thing about London, however, is the way that it is so easy to get away from these monsters and into the quiet parks, woodlands and lakes that I mentioned before. These are places where the people can run and jump and free themselves of their worries. Here, one experiences a feeling of tranquillity and also freedom. What puzzles me, though, is that the people of London seem to always have a small, itching desire to go back to the centre of London. Do they not realise that being here is doing them a lot of good and being there is not? It seems as though this constant scratching at the back of their minds gets the better of them and they do eventually return to the busy city where, once again, day after day, they will be regurgitated until its time for their next recharging session in the park. So, you see, the cycle just carries on and on.
After all that I have said, you are probably thinking that I don’t like London that much but I beg to differ. The one thing that I haven’t told you about London is the feeling you get at finally being apart of life there. At first you feel scared but as you grow more confident in the way of life there and in your surroundings, you start to feel a nervous, but excited, fluttery feeling in your stomach. Once you experience this feeling, you realise that you are in love……..with London. You have learnt to stride along the streets pretending that you haven’t a care in the world and you begin to discover and appreciate the small and beautiful nooks and crannies of London which are the only places in London where you can sit in a café or pub and listen to the people around you. It is here that you see people finally relaxing and speaking freely and you are surprised by the amount of extremely interesting people who live in London. When one finds these hidden places of London, it proves that they have finally become a true Londoner. This automatically gains you a lot of respect from outsiders. London begins to feel like the centre of the world and it seems as though, this must be the best place to be. When people ask you where you are from, you feel proud to answer: ‘London’
By Hannah Perlin
