Have you ever noticed that some places are teeming with a great variety of life, while others are featureless and boring? Think about a pond, which has 5 sorts of amphibians, countless dragonflies, beetles, snakes, fish, crabs, worms, eels… and that’s before we start counting waterbird, mammal and plant species. It’s a rich environment. The same goes for a coral reef, a salt lagoon, even the grassland – forest interface to a lesser extent. Pure forest or open ocean or unrelieved tracts of grassland are boring by comparison, and have far fewer species. That’s because edges are fun. They provide a variety of habitats, or as I like to think of it they encourage complexity by breaking the energy gradient over a fractal interface.
I hope I haven’t lost you yet, because this is about London. You see, one of the things I love about Australia is that it’s home to a wide variety of cultures, and London is the same. There are communities who have moved here from the subcontinent, the middle east, the caribbean, and continental europe. There are subcultures including goths, punks, hippies, clubbers, trainspotters, sloane rangers, and royalists. They speak their languages, practise their religions, cook their food. Most of all they see each see the world in an unique way. In the same way that the interface between grassland, woods and water makes a richly complex and productive physical environment, the mix of cultures in this city produces something wonderful too.
On Sunday we visited Camden Market, which primarily has goth/punk stalls selling studded jackets, union jack t-shirts, piercings, black lace corsets and so on. But there are dodgy looking Iranian boys selling sharp suit jackets, Rasta buskers, a large Jamaican matron pushing twins in a pram, and even English soccer fans doing rather obvious drug deals near the market entrance.
If we all bought the same coffee, ate the same food, and thought the same thoughts the world would be very boring. London, on the other hand, puts the cosmos in cosmopolitan. It’s wonderful! Which was this morning brought home to me in the most entirely charming way – once again involving me finding a toilet for youngest son. This one was free, in Leicester Square, and huge because of the nearby theaters. It was filled with the most haunting, eerie, beautiful singing. A Chinese folk tune from the cleaner as he worked.
Postscript:
Somewhat on topic: we were taken to dinner last night – a delicious Indian feast – by the kindest, sweetest man. It was Raat!! Thank you, dear Raat. It was a wonderful meal and I so enjoyed meeting you. I hope we meet again soon!
The photographs I’ve used are from that meal. Check the size of that paper dosa. Wow!