Iqbal Ahmed: Empire of the Mind

Enjoyably clunky, pithy, idiosyncratic wanderings around (post-)colonial Britain.

Every hardship is relief,there is one hardship with two relief so one hardship can't over come two relief

Patrick Leigh Fermour: Between the Woods and the Water

Scattered with poppies, the golden-green waves of the cornfields faded. The red sun seemed to tip one end of a pair of scales below the horizon, and simultaneously to lift an orange moon at the other. Only two days off the full, it rose behind a wood, swiftly losing its flush as it floated up, until the wheat loomed out of the twilight like a metallic and prickly sea.

Craig Taylor: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It

The best slogan for London would be, "It just gets worse."

No matter what you want to do in London, there's a million others who are in the queue ahead of you. Everything is always a hassle, because there is just so many people wanting to do the same shit at the same time. No matter what it is. And no matter what cool idea you've had, there's somebody else who's already done it. And they're usually younger, richer and more well-connected than you.

London is like any other kind of addiction, really. You get 5 per cent entertainment out of it, and that makes you suffer through the other 95 per cent of it.

London is actually a beautiful place when the weather's good; the mood is lighter and everybody's smiling. But for the other 350 days a year, it's miserable. You're standing there waiting for the bus in the rain or you're waiting for a train on a platform and it's freezing. Always a persistent drizzle - or if it's not drizzling, it's overcast and cold.

All evil originates here... I mean industrialisation, capitalism, imperialism, the whoel idea of enslaving people for their resources and turning everybody into zombies and robots and, you know, raping the earth and raping the world's population and... they all start here.