satyrica

although a fully signed up fan of London life, the biggest negative that I've been consistently struck be the whole time I've lived here is the absence of any kind of culture of hanging out.

Despite the wealth of friends I have round here one way or another, whenever we meet up it always seems to have to involve going out and consuming, spending money on some kind of activity, which as often as not is being pursued as an excuse to meet up rather than for its own sake and actually impairs the quality of the time we spend together, and in small clusters of twos and threes rather than all gathering round someone's (parents') house in a big group like we used to (although it must be conceded that to some extent this was motivated at the time by our lack of disposable income and the narrow range of delights Southampton had to offer.)

I guess London's so vast, even though we live in the same city we live so far from each other that we meet up centrally for equality of convenience and its prices such that none of us can afford to live anywhere with a living room that fifteen people could comfortably hang out and we're all so fucking busy with our exciting London lives that we can never all find a time when we're free or are just too nackered when we get in to pick up the phone.

Right now I can't imagine anything worse than going back to living with flatmates I wasn't so comfortable just sitting around with and the idea of moving in somewhere by myself would be suicidal.

[This whinge is brought to you by the fact that I've just had a couple of fantastic nights out where I've just gone out and hung out with friends and their flatmates and had a great time doing nothing more than sitting around and chatting, but today my mood has inexplicably crashed.]