My (mostly) scottish upbringing was blighted by one tiny but intractable fact. Embarking on the crooked journey of adolescent self-discovery, I scoured a (mostly) Scottish landscape for reassuring reflections of that most important entity: me. They weren't very reassuring-bits of border country, a few dank drinking holes in Perth, many grim-yet-transcendent highland years, my Scottish-nationalist granny in Orkney. I didn't come from any single one of these places. Echoing my teenage self, they were contradictory and temporary. But they were (mostly) Scottish. Or, at least, they would have been if it weren't for my "black fact." I was born in London.
Later, while living in Glasgow, if I had told people I was born in Kyoto, they would never have thought to riposte: "so you're Japanese, then, ya bastard." But merely because my parents had once made a temporary and ill-advised emigration to the south-east of England, conceiving me in the process, Glaswegians felt at liberty to grip me in a pally but painful arm-lock and rejoice: "so you're UNG-lish, then, ya bastard."
For ten years in Glasgow, I wrestled with my mildly beleaguered identity and found it a good city for the puzzle. Scottishness there isn't as important as west-Scottishness and then the only real issue is Catholic or Protestant. In fact, if you live in Glasgow but come from New Town Edinburgh, you might as well be UNG-lish too.
In Glasgow, for the first time, I found myself at liberty-in the way of American cities-to be who I wanted to be. Despite its working-class myths, Glasgow is the closest thing Britain has to a classless city. And, again in the manner of some American cities, it is not so much the idea of national identity that matters as a deep, self-made municipal character: its very city-ness.
The black spot of my London birth didn't quite get laughed out of me in Glasgow. But what was left of it, I repudiated. In the lead-up to the devolution referendum there was a reason for repudiating London, one that elevated itself beyond resentful anti-Englishness or chippy Scottish nationalism. Indeed, there was a sensible "not-London" political view. A settlement was in the offing that would help Britain curve off its post-imperial decline, a decline for which London seemed to be the centrifugal drag. Scotland was becoming a place you could belong to without fighting daft old battles of history or childhood.
But if Scotland had gifted me a new, less troubled identity, I could not then betray it by skulking off to the English megalopolis just because an attractive job offer came along. One thing was certain. Wherever I moved after Glasgow, I would never go "back" to London.
I built up a paranoid edifice of theory to justify an antipathy to the English capital which was too emotionally charged to pass convincingly for disdain. But there were nevertheless sound points to the "not-London" ideology. Britain is a ludicrously arse-heavy country. Like no other European capital, London-by sheer dint of its disproportionate size and squillion-year history-dishonours the rest of the nation, sucking talent, business and pride into the place of government. What do Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow and Aberdeen all have in common? Bloody London.
Where Glasgow looks hungrily, anxiously, over the Atlantic or-leapfrogging south-to other hungry, anxious European cities, London just gazes ever inwards on its levantine, unreflecting self. Londoners are not yearners after meaning. They are an incredibly complex, ethnically diversifying population yanked together by a surprising uniformity of English grumbling. It's probably the only distinctly English characteristic left in the metropolis. The London grumble distils all national moans into a single, muddy spirit of complaint: ridiculous property prices, rotten public transport, filthy hospitals, overburdened schools, silly little Victorian terraces on silly little clogged roads, moderately irritating weather. What, the rest of the country would like to know, are they complaining about?
So, nearly two years ago, I came to live in London. Yes, it's a bit embarrassing. One of my excuses is that I came, not for love of its cosmopolitan ?lan, but for love (my girlfriend put me up, low rent, I couldn't turn her down). Another reason is worse than an excuse. I came because of a job offer. O my Scottish heart, what have I done?
Well, for one, I have discovered that I came "from" London in a way that is now quite unusual for Londoners. I have a vague, ur-memory of the city where my parents bought a house (in Islington) for ?8,000 (now worth ?1m). I suddenly find I can be nostalgic for a vanished British capital, the lost communities, the mythical era of the time before the restaurants arrived. It's great. I can be a London bore as well as a Glasgow bore.
Cities absorb you and your sense of self far too quickly for comfort. But I have found something about London genuinely to love. It's nothing to do with the cultural luxuries on offer (at a price), the fact that it is a world city in the way that Britain is not a world country, or its habit of being endlessly unknowable and therefore endlessly fascinating. It is the very discomfort of London that has crept up on me like a sinister romance. I do not feel especially at home in this strange, labyrinthine place. I do not expect ever to feel unquestioningly at home in it. For the moment, I am quite happy here.
