"I’m just a Londoner trying to avoid eye contact," said Andrea Levy on London Nights, explaining her habit of looking at the ground as she walks along the street where she lives.
That surprised me rather; Londoners have a special way of being able to walk along busy streets without looking anyone in the eye but, by some magic, not bumping in to them either.
It was a skill I had after any years living & working in central London, but I suddenly lost it after moving back up North for a while.
In the village it was only polite to greet everyone you passed, & sometimes stop to pass the time of day. Suddenly I remembered how my grandfather had complained when he visited us (his daughter’s family) for the first time after we moved to a city suburb. He had been out, as was his habit, for a Sunday morning ‘constitutional’, smartly dressed, complete with trilby hat. He passed someone washing his car, raised his hat & said ‘good morning’; ‘the ****** just ignored me!’
One evening, on a working trip back to the capital, I was walking up the still busy Strand quite late, about 11pm, back to where I was staying in Covent Garden, when I became aware that I was getting funny looks – especially from the middle aged man (not English, but European) who gave me a rather mocking sort of bowed greeting. I realised I had been walking along making eye contact, half expecting to greet someone I recognised.
It’s always harder to go back, to remember how you used to do it, & for ages after that I could only scurry along when walking alone in London, eyes very firmly down, while taking surreptitious peeks at other people just to try & work out exactly where they were looking.
By one of those mysterious homogenising processes however, people no longer greet everyone they meet in the village; partly because there have been so many incomers, you never know who’s local & who is not, but mainly because hardly anybody walks any more in this age of the car. The bus timetable has even had several minutes added to allow for the extra time needed to negotiate roads narrowed by vehicles parked on both sides of the street.
