Brexit and the upheavals of doing a place up in London

I have a new decorator; the old one abandoned me after a week. He just left one day and never came back. I believe he was too rich for this job; he lived in Fulham and had just spent £30,000 on implants for a new set of teeth. My new decorator is very keen. His name is Sergio and comes from Albania. Yesterday he asked me if he could come and work over the bank holiday weekend; he loves his job and works really hard. I was trying to convince him to take a break. ‘No, no’ he said ‘you don’t pay me to have tea breaks’ it’s all right Sergio’ I said ‘you’ve been working all day. It made me somehow nervous watching him work so conscientiously and with such passion, plus, I needed a break too.

Sergio loves his job and is very proud of what he does. Everything must be perfect, and I must say that, indeed, it is. The one hundred years old bay window has just had a face-lift. All the cracks have been filled in, the wood has been smoothed over, and three coats of paint have been brushed on the surface with extreme competence and precision. Now that all the refurbishing work in my flat has almost come to an end I have focused my attention on the endless talks, panels and interviews about the referendum, and I am getting nervous and a bit cheesed off. The referendum is getting nearer and nearer, less than a week, and I still don’t know how to vote? I am kidding! That is not the case. As a matter of fact I won’t be able to vote at all – and that’s exactly what cheesed me off on the first place – Why? Because I am a European, a real one: I come from the continent. As you probably have noticed, if you have lived in the UK long enough, Brits don’t think of themselves as Europeans, and after all these years I am still trying to find out to what continent they belong to.

I don’t know what it would be better for the UK, stay or leave? But I think that if you have lived in London – and I mean London - for ten or twenty years you should be able to vote. To understand why, all you have to do is to look at the figures. In London 36.7% of the population are foreign-born, against 63.3% who were born in the UK, therefore a quarter of the London’s population was not born in the UK. If you look at the figures, you can see that London is the least English town in the UK. Here are some numbers:  73,000 people from Portugal; 51,000 from Lithuania; 49,000 Germans; 49,000 Americans; 16,000 from Japan; 15,000 Swedish; 97,000 Italians; 90,000 French; 94,000 Irish; and a staggering 185,000 from Poland.  

Brexit or not brexit – and here I am not questioning the validity of some people’s arguments – London is London: an international, multi-racial, multi-cultural, republic. Sorry monarchy. Let’s not leave the queen out. She is German, right? Her dynasty is a branch of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. While Prince Charles’s surname is Montbatten-Windsor from the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. I already feel the need to elongate my surname, which is only seven letters long. Whatever happens with Brexit London is a different story altogether. Of course I understand why people might get tired of London and its multiculturalism. Too many choices: a never ending number of food and restaurants from all over the world, coffee shops, coffee houses, snack bars, tapas restaurants, Vietnamese street food, Sicilian arancini – and this is just around the corner from my house – how exhausting. It does get boring after a bit.

So, if you want to live in a place where no one can cook or knows how to make a coffee and people think that an aubergine is a vegetable (it’s a fruit), the answer is simple, just move out of London. As for me, without my Albanian decorator, and now friend, I would be still sitting in a cold flat with no kitchen and no bedroom. Luckily I’d still have all these restaurants to enjoy, but for how long? I wonder.