I went on holiday. It was lovely, thanks. Tan, wine, etc. The sound of crickets. The blazing aircon of a European supermarket and whole nights spent arguing about the fan. Badminton. Bread. But while I was away, loads of stuff happened. Our first night out of London, the world economy collapsed. Whoomph. Like a sneeze. Then a few days in, my friend Katie, who lives next door, texted to tell us about the view from our windows – riot vans parking up, police leaping among our local prostitutes who were half dressed but not in the usual way – they were wearing pyjama bottoms. At the end of our road she saw a swelling group of worshippers protecting their mosque, and rioters trying to mingle among them to avoid arrest. At home, she implied, everything was breaking a bit. During our clammy evening drinking Jet 27 (alcoholic mouthwash; it stains your tongue), we refreshed our phones' Twitter feeds for updates on the violence. The shops went. The windows smashed. At one point a rumour began that a tiger had escaped from London Zoo. The cities burned. I felt very far away indeed, but also, never closer.
I didn't do a gap year, or a college term abroad, any of that "finding yourself" stuff, and as I've grown older my London loyalty has quietly emerged, like snails after a storm. I've travelled around a little bit, but the countryside is obviously nonsense, and I always find other cities somewhat… wanting. New York? Tall London. Paris? Smoky London. Amsterdam? London with mayonnaise. So the feeling that came with seeing my marvellous city wobble from a distance was a little like, I imagine, how it feels to spontaneously lactate at the sound of a crying baby. I found myself gazing in the direction of the airport, picturing the route home.
We hunched around our phones, updating, updating, calling out news from our neighbourhood, addicted to the rush from Twitter's ticker tape. It wasn't until returning home on a Terravision coach, seeing the police patrolling meaningfully, that I realised that I'd seen nothing – I'd read about the fires and broken glass, and Turkish shop-owners guarding their high street like sexy Beefeaters (BILFs?), but my experience of the riots was all in words. All in badly spelled Tweeted yells, postcards sent the wrong way – to a holiday, rather than from. Did this inflate our anxiety? Fuel our excitement? The lack of pictures having the effect of an unseen monster in a horror film. The language, the tropes, the "community"s, the "society"s – the repetition of phrases acting like sinister drum rolls, reeling you in. Were the echoes heard from our holiday home amplified by the way we heard them? And if so, would we have had the same experience if we'd been in the suburbs, or somewhere similarly un-looted?
We came home last week, a plane, that coach. There's still a smashed car outside my flat, a "police aware" note fluttering on the passenger seat, weighed down with broken glass, but I'm having trouble really understanding what happened. Because I missed it. I had tonsillitis one day when I was 12, and missed the maths lesson where I should have been taught long division. To this day I have no clue. Not one. And I fear the same will happen with the riots – I'll never be able to fully comprehend that week because I was absent. It's a thought that disturbs me.
I missed a conversation my friends had with an older girl 17 years ago about "cool jeans", hence my reliance ever since on a single pair from Gap. These lost moments add up – I'm only now learning to enjoy coffee, having missed the crucial moment in my youth. I don't know how to fold shirts. There will always be a gap in my relationship with London, and I don't like it. I don't like it at all.
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