I don’t get scared in London. Not really. If you know a place well — and I’ve lived here most of my life — you learn to avoid the places where danger lurks. You learn to body swerve the West End at midnight at the weekend, know which dodgy pubs to avoid, and which Tube lines to skip at the wrong end of the day. There are postcodes I feel uneasy in, so I leave them alone, just as I would the wrong walk home.
When you know somewhere, you become totally prescriptive about how you navigate it. So consequently, I never put myself in danger. Not through choice, anyway.
Not that I’ve been completely successful in this, of course. Many years ago, when skinheads ruled the streets and I looked like a post-modern rockabilly (circa 1982), a bunch of them chased me all the way from the Oval to Brixton.
A year earlier, when I mostly spent my time waltzing around London wearing a silver zoot suit, keychain, beret and goatee beard, I was stabbed by some “casuals” as I left The Hemingford Arms in King’s Cross (some from the fashion police probably say I deserved it). Wrong time, wrong place. Right switchblade razor (and I still have scars to prove it).
I was reminded how it felt to be scared. There was a particularly aggressive atmosphere and an edge to people in the street
I dressed up a lot when I was young, but the only time I felt truly scared was back in the punk times. I remember watching a midnight showing of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Tottenham Court Road and gradually realising that I was sitting in front of a bunch of disgruntled knuckle draggers who were waiting for the opportunity to strike. They didn’t, but only because I nipped out before the end, as fast as my designer bondage trousers would carry me.
However, 10 days ago I experienced a subliminal Proustian sensation as I was suddenly reminded about how it felt to be scared. I had just been to the Curzon Mayfair (the best cinema in London) to see the Scorsese film (too long, no second act, no third) and was walking home with my wife, up Edgware Road. The streets were still full of people leaving the pro-Palestinian march, moving en masse, many of whom were wrapped in Palestinian flags.
The area has a rich Arab heritage anyway, which is one of the reasons we like it, and one of the reasons we’ve lived here for over 25 years. We like the noise, the vibrancy, the food, and — saliently — the people. Known as Little Beirut or Little Cairo, it is peppered with some of London’s finest shisha cafés and Arabic restaurants.
But on this Saturday, as we were walking along a stretch of road we must have walked hundreds of times before, I was overcome with the weirdest sensation. There was a particularly aggressive atmosphere, and an edge to the people in the street. There was too much shouting. Too much eyeballing. Too much of the wrong kind of expectation.
These weren’t locals, and my neighbourhood suddenly felt alien. I am not Jewish, but I immediately wondered what it would feel like if I were wearing a Star of David or sporting a yarmulke.
How would I feel if, instead of showing my allegiance to Stiff Little Fingers or the Buzzcocks with a discreet button badge, I was sporting the Israeli flag. Instantly I was transported back to 1977, being on a night bus wearing a plastic leather jacket with recently shorn hair. It was irrational, paranoid, but it was real.
After a fleeting concern that I was deliberately and inappropriately appropriating someone else’s problem, I was consumed by empathy. And this empathy, and this odd kind of surreal fear stayed with me until we got home.
And after feeling a little embarrassed — who was I to assume an emotion on behalf of an entire community — all I felt was an acute sadness. Was I being presumptuous? As a cosseted gentile, probably.
Would I have felt similarly if I had been wearing the Palestinian national flag walking around Stamford Hill? Almost certainly. But the sadness has stayed with me. And it’s a sadness that could be felt by anyone in London. After all, if you don’t have empathy for people you don’t know, you’re probably not a real Londoner.
As the Iranian musician Mahan Esfahani said: “Our problems and heartaches are the same, and if Jews are a target, then we all are.”
