‘This place is beautiful but boring and lacks style,’ my friend Sam bemoaned. She’s recently left London to spend time with family during a sabbatical. ‘Sydney came 17th out of 18 cities for dynamism in Time Out’s City Index survey.’
The survey ranked cities for inspiration, food and drink, community, sociability and affordability as well as dynamism. London came 10th. Most of the results – which include 37% of Londoners have felt hungover in the past week, we work an average 41 hours per week and commuters taking the train are the most miserable – are hardly surprising.
Going out makes us happy, according to the survey, so I was surprised by how infrequently Londoners go out – on average 4.7 times a month. But perhaps that statistic is more of a reflection of the 7,000 people who found time to respond to the survey than a reflection of Londoners as a whole.
Going out on average 4.7 times a week can get exhausting. After a bad glass of wine (which was included in the price of my fringe theatre ticket), I was sick at midnight on Monday. My longer-than-average commute the next morning felt longer than usual, but I felt uplifted by Jilly Cooper at literary salon The Books That Built Me (and a glass of Bollinger) on Tuesday evening.
Going out frequently can lead to mistakes. ‘Just arriving at St Pancras… Still good for meeting at 6.15pm,’ a friend texted on Tuesday. I quickly called her, ‘The gig is next Tuesday. I hope you haven’t gone out of your way?’
‘Oh, yes. Silly me. It’s no trouble and my fault for mixing up the dates.’
Meanwhile, one of my journalist colleagues managed to review the wrong restaurant, which she raved about to the PR of the restaurant that she was supposed to review before creating even more confusion and upset by citing a third restaurant, whose name doesn’t even exist.
Perhaps the survey merely underlined the fact that there is no average Londoner!
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