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twat. Look at the twat who eats! There’s that twat off the telly all weighed down with groceries – what a lame bastard!
    Now, that was a very atypical encounter in one way – people are seldom rude. But typical in another. It made me feel very exposed and visible. It reminded me that all the things people normally do anonymously in a big city, in my case might have to be done while being observed and made to represent the innate twattiness of all mankind.
    But even when strangers are very pleasant, I find it impossible to respond unselfconsciously. From the moment someone says ‘Excuse me’, I’m thinking about how I’m coming across. Do I seem like a nice person? Or do I seem annoyed? Or do I seem like a nice person who’s rightly annoyed at being asked for a photo/autograph/to say hi to their friend’s voicemail under these awkward circumstances? Or do I seem like a nice person who’s rightly thrilled? Or a horrible person who’s wrongly thrilled? Or a horrible person who’s wrongly annoyed? Or a nice normal person who’s understandably surprised but the reality of whose goodwill shines through?
    Sometimes I walk away buoyed up by the enthusiasm of someone who’s said I’m funny. Other times I’m fretting about the embarrassing awkwardness of the encounter. But I almost always wish I’d been nicer or ‘more genuine’ – that the warmth I attempt to display didn’t feel so forced. I can’t avoid the conclusion that really nice people don’t keep asking themselves if they seem nice. Smug bastards.
    So I cross the road and walk north-east up the south-west side of Quex Road, past the junction with Mutrix and past a school on the corner with Abbey Road. I don’t like the look of this school. It looks like a primary school. I don’t like primary schools. It’s also a modern building and, if we must have primary schools, I’d rather they weren’t in modern buildings.
    There’s a bit in a Sherlock Holmes story where Holmes and Watson are coming back into London past Clapham Junction and Holmes says: ‘It’s a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high and allow you to look down upon the houses like this.’
    I agree with Holmes, it is. Watson didn’t, as he tells the reader: ‘I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough’ – I suppose the Battersea area wasn’t so gentrified in those days.
    But Holmes is admiring something specific: ‘Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea.’
    ‘The board-schools.’
    ‘Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.’
    When you travel into London on any of those raised lines, you can still see exactly what Holmes meant. At that time (this story was published in 1893) London itself was a fairly new phenomenon, the modern metropolis, the largest city there had ever been, Ripper London, a terrifying, blackened, smog-ridden, lawless place, a horrific vision of humanity’s future lit by the guttering flames of coal gas: teeming, impoverished, disease-ridden millions crammed into a place of crime and death.
    Until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, the life expectancy of those in urban areas was vastly lower than that of country-dwellers. Cities were very fertile breeding grounds for disease. But they were just as welcoming to business and industry as they were to bacteria. So people were drawn to the cities to get jobs, and went in the knowledge that they might consequently die. The commercial draw of the capital more than compensated for the deaths it caused, so London’s population rose despite them. It was a bath with the plug out that was nevertheless filling up.
    We rightly associate Victorian times with that sort of chaotic urban squalor. But we should also credit the people of that era with