A typical Saturday morning ritual is picking up the FT Weekend and reading Tyler Brule’s stupid little space-wasting column which then induces my blood to boil and leads to endless rants to friends who are discerning enough to see past his facade and label HIM, not London, as ‘FAILED’. Unlike Tyler, bellepoq’s typical Saturday morning ritual does not include reading magazines about Baltic ships and orgasming over Scandinavian design or whatever it is he does when he is not looking at himself in the mirror.
There are so many things wrong with today’s rant about London bellepoq does not know where to begin. But the first paragraph is a good place to start.
1. The Christiane Amanpour thing is not even funny. At all.
2. We are familiar with failblog.org so don’t try and pretend you’re funny by using the old FAILED joke.
3. Bellepoq likes to imagine the future of the media sometimes with her learned friends who care passionately about the future of the media. We see no need to refer to that activity as if it were a hobby of
'I need a band-aid for my brain!'
ours. That would be lame, worthy of a FAILED.
3. Pray tell what is Tyler’s remedy for knife crime in London? Oh wait, he doesn’t need to have one. He spends his time on a high horse in Marylebone, and then his high horse takes him to St Pancras where he can be whisked away to the xenophobic land of Switzerland and never have to come face to face with a hoodie at any point along the way.
4. Would rather slit my wrists than live in Switzerland.
5. Heathrow sure does suck but don’t recall in any one of the million journeys I have made through that airport, because you know, bellepoq is just as well-traveled as dear Tyler, smelling urine upon arrival. Perhaps Tyler peed in his pants?
6. “As we made our way into central London, we travelled along a rubbish-lined motorway and then turned on to rubbish-strewn streets. Set back from the curb were shuttered shopfronts, little street-life and patchy street lighting.” London is a huge city. Some of it really sucks. A lot of people are poor. Get the fuck over it.
7. That the Shepherd’s Bush wasteland (which bellepoq concurs with) “hasn’t been turned into a proper mixed-use, awe-inspiring building to further generate development in the UK will go down in the history of urbanism as one of the great, wasted opportunites of the 21st century” unfortunately does not registers on the global radar of pressing issues Tyler.
8. Agree that turning Oxford Circus into a Shibuya style crossing has its problems, but don’t you just hate the way he so categorically extols the virtues of Japanese and Swiss people every single fucking week? Perhaps he would like to be reincarnated as a sushi.
9. As poq also asserts, London has never been a city to be ashamed of its dirty, thuggish history. Yes, there is agreement among Londoners that probably we apply too many band-aids here and there and fail to really tackle the problems with ’sustainable solutions’. Yet on a micro-level, let bellepoq remind all those who moan all day of the lack of air-conditioning and whatnot on the underground that one is journeying along the oldest subway system in the world in a city that has existed since Roman times. Bellepoq too does not wish to be suffocated to death on the underground but is quite certain that our politicians too do not want their constituents to die on them and are devising ways to solve this, little band-aid by little band-aid.
10. Yes there is a lot wrong wit London. Yes, it probably will never function like Zurich or Copenhagen. But for every Tyler who escapes from this city there are 10 more who will want to live here, so good riddance to him really.
