The Same is True of Piccadilly Circus

 The year I turned eighteen I decided to spend the summer holidays backpacking around Europe with a couple of my school chums. We would catch the train to Paris and make our way slowly South, then East, North and finally West, returning in time for matriculation. I would be reading Law at Cambridge. The trip was to be my last hurrah before half a decade of academic grind.

I did not expect Father to pay for the whole thing. Of course, he could have; quite easily. He’d bought Susannah a pony for her fifteenth birthday and recently loaned our eldest brother, Chester, enough to set up his consultancy. A European trip wouldn’t make the slightest dent in my father’s finances, but I knew not to ask him to foot the bill. My father was a great believer in showing initiative. He would regularly regale us with the story of his own slow and honourable rise to success. “I didn’t get where I am today by riding on another chap’s coattails,” he said, and forced us all to take Saturday jobs.

I can’t speak for my siblings, but I found my Saturday job experience a little humiliating. It was not that I thought myself above the work, it was the way the other employees called me Posh Miles and hummed Common People under their breath, every time they walked past my till. I did not make any friends in work, but nonetheless persevered and, by Easter of my final school year, had saved enough money to fund half of my European trip. I was expecting Father to offer the rest.

I approached him after dinner one evening. He was in his study, where he’d retired with a book and a glass of Jameson to smoke his pipe and doze as he did most evenings. “Sir,” I said, for my father liked to maintain an air of formality with me and my brothers, “I was hoping to spend the summer traveling ‘round Europe.” “Were you indeed,” he replied, pausing to chug on his pipe, “and what, pray tell, do you expect to discover in Europe?” I might have said romance, more specifically, girls, or fine food and drink, and all manner of artistic distraction, but I knew my father too well to think him swayed by anything so trivial. “Culture,” I said, “and life experience.” (My father valued life experience highly. It was according to him, sadly lacking in most of the young graduates who came knocking on his office door, looking a job.)

He did not answer immediately so I repeated myself, somewhat desperately, “Europe’s full of culture and politics and history.” “The same is true of Piccadilly Circus,” said Father, “try pitching your tent down there, some Saturday night.” He turned back to his novel: the latest Jeffrey Archer hardback. It was clear that he wasn’t going to bankroll my European adventure. I was angry then -as angry as I’d ever been- for I was the good son, the one who didn’t gamble, or get young girls in trouble or let my hair grow ridiculously long.

I could not understand why my father wasn’t getting his cheque book out and so, to spite him, I said, “ok then, Father, I’ll spend my summer in a tent in Piccadilly Circus. It’ll be just as good as touring Europe, most likely better. I shall live on cheeseburgers and takeaway coffee and play feel good hits on a battery-operated boombox. I shall have a laugh with the tourists and sneak into the National Portrait Gallery when I need to pee. I shall gain all the life experience I could possibly need and still have change leftover from a fifty pound note.”

I assumed my father would intervene. For all his rags to riches talk, he had become a dreadful, preening snob. I did not think he’d relish the idea of his youngest son, loafing around Piccadilly Circus, sleeping outside like a homeless man. I thought wrong and being stubborn -like my father- held the upper hand so long it was too late to fold.

So, here I am, in Piccadilly Circus, spending my summer in a borrowed tent. It is not romantic. There have been no girls worth mentioning, no fine food or drink. The art was great for the first few days, but now that I’ve begun to smell, they no longer let me into the art museums. It is not how I thought my summer would be. But I have to give my father credit. He was right about the life experience. When my pals get back from Venice, I’ll ask them how their adventure’s been. I’ll smile and nod and swipe through their photos and compliment them on their tans. Then, I’ll lean back in my chair and pause and try to look enlightened. “Everybody’s done Rome and Paris,” I’ll say, “but honestly, chaps, you haven’t lived ‘til you’ve spent Saturday night in Piccadilly Circus. The whole world’s there and it never sleeps.”

Inspired by a line from Agatha Christie’s 1948 novel, Taken at the Flood