UCL darling! Imagine my surprise and joy when, upon taking up my place at this educational establishment, I discovered that the L stands for London! Could it get any better?
No it couldn’t, because Ken Livingstone said so. Writing in The Londoner, he informed a delighted readership that London is now The World’s Leading City. Ever since I arrived here last week, I really feel like I belong. I have therefore set out to help readers of Pi get to the bottom of what it is that makes London tick and what it is that makes it so good, so here is an enthralling and original article on that very subject.
London’s streets bustle with all sorts of people, many of which are poor, brown, or most likely both. But I don’t mind that because poor brown people make me multicultural. The wonderful thing about this is that it reminds me of the holiday I took in Lagos the summer before last. These people make our city more colourful, both literally and figuratively. They also make our city more exciting, and thus by association they make me more exciting. I also know some of them. Take Abdul for example. Abdul runs a takeaway near my flat in Islington, and I often buy a kebab from him. He’s teaching me Arabic words like “£3.50 boss.” Thus Abdul and I share a mutually beneficial cross-cultural experience which you can’t get anywhere else in the world.
Londoners have a wonderful capacity for in depth and biting self analysis. They are not content to simply drift along, going about their daily business. Instead they must constantly ask themselves “what is London,” “what makes us all so brilliant,” “why am I still holding this copy of Pi?” Thus the brave spirit of Londoners in the Nazi blitz is recreated every day.
The really great thing though is that all of London’s citizens live in a spirit of tolerance and friendship. So multiracial is London that it wasn’t just white middle class people who died in the 7/7 bombings, but a satisfying multi-ethnic blend (thanks for that genius comment, Holly!). Londoners note with righteous pleasure that the racist murder of black teenager Anthony Walker in Liverpool could never have happened in Greater London, let alone in Eltham.