Each month in Home from Home we ask someone to compare Dublin with another city in which they have lived. Sometimes they are Irish who have lived (or are still living) abroad, sometimes they are expatriates in Dublin. This month we spoke with former Totally Dublin regular Karl McDonald about his adopted home of London.
How did you find yourself moving to London initially?
There was a combination of push and pull, as with anything. I was employed here after college, but I was underemployed, you might say. It felt as if working in Dublin at that point in my life fit around my lifestyle, which was just the lifestyle I had in college but with more pints and fewer cans. I hadn’t even moved out. Moving to London seemed like a way to have a clean break and start focusing much harder on a “career” and being an adult and so forth. All that being said though, I wouldn’t have done it if my girlfriend wasn’t working there first.
London is often compared to Dublin, presumably as it’s our nearest capital city, but is it even a fair comparison to make, given the relative scales of the places?
It’s not fair. There are about three times as many people in the London metropolitan area as there are in the entire county of Ireland. When you first move over, you can develop this tendency to incredulously tell your friends back home about the Tube system and the better restaurants and more art and so forth, but it’s not a competition. Dublin was never the capital of a worldwide empire full of lads who decided they wanted to chip off the walls of Assyrian temples and ship them back to London to be displayed for free in perpetuity for the greater glory and education of the nation.
In London do you find yourself mixing with other Irish people a lot, or is London such a melting pot that your crowd is more diverse?
I have friends who aren’t Irish, but when you first move over, you go straight to the people you know already from home. And then you meet their friends, and you go to their parties, and suddenly you have this new, sprawling friend group that also consists only of Irish people. But then again, I did live with four Icelandic people for a couple of months, which I’m not sure would have happened in Portobello or wherever.
What do you miss about Dublin, and what in particular would you like to bring back to Dublin from London?
Dublin is in the middle of concentric rings of city, suburbs, exurbs, whatever. Everything points to a couple of square miles in the middle, from canal to canal and from Stoneybatter to the harp bridge thing. The bus, train and Luas all brings you in. So everyone you know, and everything you’re likely to want to do, is in this mostly walkable area. In London, you could end up with three people all having to travel an hour each just to meet up in a normal pub, in a normal area, that suits you all. It’s hard to organise that sometimes, and it’s much rarer for one thing to lead to another until I’m at an afterparty seven hours later having met 25 people I know 25 different ways during the night. I also miss Irish TV and radio and culture and fixations, and to an extent the food, and my friends, family and dog. None of this I can bring with me.
In what ways is London more class / grim than Dublin? [delete as applicable]
There’s a lot going on in London, whether you want to drink gin cocktails from a Bird’s custard tin or go to see Leyton Orient play at an hour’s notice. If you’re bored, you want to be bored. And buses run all night. So that’s all quite class. Rush hour on the Tube, though, is grim, and so is a lot of the culture that spins off of London being this huge financial centre full of people paid to make more money from a pile of money. It is quite alienating not to have money in London, on a sliding scale all the way from oligarch to homeless person, and of course the city can never really feel like it’s yours in the way Dublin can even when it’s raining and you’re getting hassle on the street.
Words: Ian Lamont
