CAN’T afford a house? Can’t afford a meal out? Travelling six miles takes two hours and costs you £40? Have you considered getting the f**k out of London?
No affordable rents: With the capital full of other young professional housemates stealing your shampoo, have you considered living outside it? In provincial towns like Chorley and Sleaford where rent is low? They’ve got electricity and tapas, allegedly.
No nightlife options: Restaurants and nightclubs in London are famous and famously expensive. Restaurants and nightclubs in the rest of the country are less so, and often called things like The Wheatsheaf Grill or Zanzibar’s, but you can go to them.
No affordable transport: A system of underground trains in a major city is expensive. Getting the bus in Barnsley is not. Riding a bike in Wrexham is practically free. And have you considered walking to work in Warrington? It can be done, crazy as it sounds.
Overcrowding: It’s impossible to find a patch of London park not commandeered by boot camp fitness twats, rowdy bored-shitless teenagers or mums playing ‘here we go round the Mulberry bag’ for a two-year-old’s party. Could it possibly be because there’s too f**king many of you in the same place?
No time to see friends: Lengthy commutes, long working hours and spiralling service costs mean that even in the same city, you only see friends on Zoom. Are you getting it yet? That the city is a nightmare and you could just piss off somewhere nicer?
Gentrification: Be the gentrifier. Take your fancy arsehole graduate job and go and gentrify Ashton-under-Lyne. All it actually means is buying a cheap house and making the area more pleasant. Is that so evil, or are your values horrendously warped?
Pollution: You know the black snot thing ends immediately north of EN6, don’t you? You sneer when your provincial friends come down and complain about it? Then what’s stopping you moving to Staffordshire? Fear of big cats?
I’ll never get on the property ladder: No, you f**king won’t. Nor will you ever buy in Manhattan, Tokyo or Sandbanks, so have you considered living somewhere you can afford like normal people do?
I can’t talk about anything but living in London: This one is absolutely solved after six months in Stafford after which you will, finally, get over yourself. Unless you move to Cornwall or the Cotswolds. It’s still the sole topic of conversation with the refugees there.
