London is a city for everyone willing to give it a try. It has had a permanent stream of immigrants which started in Roman times and carries on today, which is why people from many countries find it hard to understand what constitutes a British person. In the opening ceremony, even some Americans thought the use of a black guy and girl in the dance sequence on the World Wide Web was an attempt at political correctness. That is so far from the truth as not only to be cynical but also patronising to the majority of people in the United Kingdom who do not see someone as a colour but as a human being. And a fellow Brit. And they are. But they can also be something else too, whether Caribbean, Australian, Kenyan, Sri Lankan or Turkish. In fact, the gripe in the British newspapers was that they were chosen due to their ridiculously photogenic features, that no ugly ones were allowed. Colour meant nothing.
This is how it works: you come to the UK with a smile and a wish to contribute, learn the language and join in with local society, and within a short space of time, you'll be just as British as everyone else. Which is to say with a pinch of immigrant in you. Practically everyone is. If you come to rip the state off, claim benefits and make chaos, you'll be a hate figure in the Daily Mail one day. And that is not a pretty place to find yourself.
They say you can never go back home once you've left. And yes that's true. The parental home is a place of your childhood, and to overstay your time or to move back in when you should be moving on is to risk causing untold damage to the relationship you have with your family. It did with mine. I went to university and afterwards, without money or a good contact to give my career a push (who needs linguistic skills in London?), I moved back into my parents' house. I became depressed, I started to neglect myself and I got involved in things which only bored twenty-somethings can get away with calling the madness of youth. When I hit my thirties, I soon got it thrown in my face and resolved to leave. Despite fly-by-night jobs, I was never mentally strong-willed enough to fly the nest. House/flat rentals were still prohibitively expensive, even at the turn of the century, and I didn't feel like flat sharing. An event in my life so disturbing as to make me physically sick occurred just before Christmas 2000, and I felt the urge to get out as life had become not only intolerable, but also impossible. I went to Prague for a few weeks to get over the ordeal and away from the situation. While I was there, I received a call inviting me to live and work in Belgium. Living costs were far lower there, and so I left the very next week for Belgium, where I remained for seven years.
But after nearly 12 years outside the country of my birth, which I appreciated more by not living there, and had only visited for long weekends once every funeral or shopping trip, it came as a surprise to arrive on 9th August 2012, in the middle of the Olympic Games, in the Britain I remembered from the late seventies and early eighties (my early childhood), where strangers said a merry "hello" to you, where station inspectors waved you through in the belief you had been good enough to buy a ticket, where you could leave your bag next to the table at a restaurant knowing it would still be there even if you did not keep an eye on it.
Yet what had fundamentally changed was the skin complexion. And I believe for the better. Living here in the countryside of Germany, it is seldom that you stumble upon a person who is not white. So I was always going to notice the change more than someone who already lives there. It's like an aunt you haven't seen in ten years who says "my my, haven't you grown?!" but your parents don't notice this because they see you every day. Local people seemed to be of all colours and religions. Despite the riots last year, London is still a triumph of integration. I saw a Moslem woman and a black woman sitting on a bench in Greenwich Park chatting and laughing in the manner of old mates, which they probably were; I saw a group of people in Jamaican flags in the shopping centre next to the Olympic Park showing a Polish girl how to get to the Underground station. I saw a guy in a turban draped in the Union Flag, hurrying to his venue. I saw a black woman weeping during the closing ceremony while the National Anthem was being played. The United Kingdom I had gone back to had caused these people to integrate in ways other nations had failed. In fact, I am doing them a great injustice by mentioning integration. A huge amount of them will have been born there. To be honest, even after seven years in Belgium and four in Germany, I cannot think of a moment when I truly felt proud of the places I lived in, and in Belgium I sympathised a lot with the North Africans in my neighbourhood, who had clearly been born there, but were still referred to in Dutch as "allochtoon", or all-comers. That was clearly not the case for these people in London.
Recently, I joined an online forum in Germany to discuss living in Rheinland Pfalz. One asked me where I was from, thinking he had noticed my bad German grammar. I said London. He replied that it would be impractical to meet then, wouldn't it? I told him I lived in Saarburg but I was from London. And there's your difference. People round here don't generally move further than their own WiFi zone. "Where you are from?" and "where you live?" are one and the same for most. But in London, the first question would be phrased, "what are your roots?"
In London, I have a Persian friend who was born in Italy. He's Jewish. I've known him for many many years, and not once would I ever say he was anything else except a Londoner. London made him a successful man and he makes sure he contributes back. I also have a Slovak friend who was a professional BMX athlete, who is still popular enough in those circles to get herself inside the Czech section of the Olympic Village. I met her in Bratislava a decade ago, when I coincidentally ran into a friend of mine and her mother out for a drink. Doing BMX, Slovakia was never going to provide the funding or the facilities to give her the career she deserved. So she moved to the UK. To Scotland first, and then to London. When I left her last, back in about 2003, she had a strong Slovak accent and a problem with articles (the/a/an). When I met her again in London last week, she was glottally stopping and diphthonging like a cockney wideboy. She's still Slovak, but she likes my country enough to want to sell her house in Slovakia and stay where she is, despite her long working hours, the much smaller living spaces and the relatively more expensive cost of living.Many other nations in the world are frightened about the encroachment of "foreignness" on their culture, the French being the most useful example in their recent banning of Moslem veils, an act that would never be tolerated on the other side of the Channel. What you wear and who you are are not inextricably linked. Although many may find it not their own taste in clothes, most would go very far to assure those people the right to wear what they wanted. Britain vacuums up cultures, religions and colours and redistributes them equally, indiscriminately and fairly, a process that highlights the futility of the actions and ridiculousness of the views of extremists on any side, whether English Defence League activists, BNP marchers, Islamists, or non-integrationists like the parents who murdered their own daughter because she did not want to marry the man they had chosen for her back in Pakistan.
In his book "Johnson's Life of London", Boris Johnson, that most intelligent of merry-makers and mayor, said, "You would expect me to say this, and I must of course acknowledge that great many cities can make all kinds of claims to primacy, but at a moment when it is perhaps excessively fashionable to b gloomy about Western civilisation I would tentatively suggest that London is just about the most culturally, technologically, politically and linguistically influential city of the past five hundred years. In fact, I don't think even the mayors of Paris, New York, Moscow, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo, Beijing or Amsterdam would quibble when I say that London is - after Athens and Rome - the third most programmatic city in history." I happen to agree with him. And my friends called it home, because it doesn't feel strange to them. It has an air of familiarity to everyone.
And the same thing happened to me. I suddenly, self-consciously and openly declared I found Britain was my home once more. But not the parental home in Kentish London. No. Too many memories, too many ghosts. But London as a whole. I was charmed by the village-like features of Kew where I have my pied-à-terre; I was beguiled by the noble maritime feel of Greenwich; I was blown away by the magnificence of the Thames as I travelled down it by boat from Hungerford Bridge to Tower Bridge; I was awestruck by the sheer opulence of Hampton Court Palace and its ancient gardens; I was taken aback by the amicable grandiosity of the Olympic Stadium as I viewed it from the top-floor window of a department store in the shopping centre. And it's so green, even in Homerton, Frognal and Bow. But most of all my heart was warmed by the Polish waitress at the restaurant on the South Bank who addressed me as "love" in true London fashion; I was impressed by the command of English of the German curator's assistant at Hampton Court; I was humbled by the local knowledge of the French-Spanish waitress at my favourite restaurant under the arches at London Bridge station; I was doubly impressed by the Persian man who could cook a splendid Full English breakfast at the greasy spoon at Kew Gardens station. There is simply no other city on Earth where inhabitants from every corner of the globe live side-by-side in fairly peaceful circumstances as equals. It is a success story that was highlighted at the Olympic opening ceremony, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the selfless British inventor of this fabulous tool we call the WorldWideWeb that I am writing these words on now, typed out on the stadium's LED pixels, "this is for everyone". How true.
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