COLIN CAMPBELL: What's the difference between Inverness and London?
The taxi driver who took me to the railway station in Maidstone on the morning after I was at a wedding down there was chatty on a subject that isn’t normally a talking point for taxi drivers.
As we sped along he jabbed a finger at various houses along the route telling me how much they’d cost. As I’d no intention of buying one this was largely irrelevant to me, but he insisted on doing it anyway.
“That one’d be £600,000, at least. The one next door, a bit bigger, I’d say no change out of £800,000. See the one on the corner, behind the hedge, at least a mill’ for that place.”
I was partly interested, although I already knew that properties in upmarket towns around London are astronomically expensive. But as we neared the station, I was silently thinking: “This property-obsessed guy actually lives here. Maybe in a £500,000 house. So how much is this journey going to set me back as his mortgage contribution?” I awaited the final charge with apprehension.
When it topped out at £18 for a 10-minute ride I was actually relieved. In the words of Kate Forbes, I reckon I dodged a bullet there.
These homes have to be financed and paid for. And for millions of people that means work, work, work.
One morning I opened the sliding doors of my room in the hotel the wedding folk were staying in for a breath of air at 5am. It was some distance off the road but already the volume of passing traffic made it sound like midday. I envisaged thousands of people pouring into the capital to be at their desks before the crack of dawn and not seeing their expensive homes again until late in the evening.
The drive down, with a couple of stops, took 13 hours from Perth, covering 500 miles. The closer we got to London the more frequent were the delays on the log-jammed motorway, unexplained periods where traffic across four lanes was at a complete standstill. No wonder, perhaps, that when moving we were being overtaken by cars travelling in lashing rain and darkness at crazy speeds.
Jams, delays, frustration and reckless speed, an unhappy way of life for many around the capital.
I planned to make a trip into London but an over-cautious text message advised against it, as several mass protests were due to be held. As it happened, this was no problem, but I noted that the cost of a 40-minute train journey was £32. For food, drink, and transport the south of England is very expensive indeed. If prices were at the same level here – and they’re high enough already – we might be having a mass protest of our own.
But that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy greatly my trip there, mainly because I met so many very nice people. A wedding is always a convivial occasion, but the rapport between the Scots in their kilts and the English folk in their finest was heartwarming.
Increasingly, some people north of the border make clear their distaste for England and “the English” and say our two countries are steadily growing further apart. They promote the fallacy that we have more in common with the EU and the French and the Germans. Have these folk ever been to England? Do they seriously believe most Scots would feel more at home in Paris or Berlin than they would in Manchester, Birmingham or London? What a bowl of steaming tripe.
We have our problems here but the pace of life is less hectic and less stressful.
But the English are our cousins and our countrymen as they have been for centuries and I hope that never changes.
On my return as I left the train from King’s Cross, Academy Street was dark and seemed pretty dead. That train seems to connect two very contrasting ways of life.
On the way home I clocked the value of houses I passed. £150,000 for that one, maybe £180,000 for the one next door, and a whopping £220,000 at least for the one behind the hedge.
