THERE IS a freedom in London that is not to be found in Dublin or in any other Irish city. I don't mean liberated, but rather the freedom to be yourself in a sense that is neither social nor political.
It has something to do with the size of the place, but that is only part of the story. Neither is it entirely a function of the anonymity that a large city affords, for that is something you can have, relatively speaking, in Dublin or other Irish cities, and no Irish city has the quality I am thinking of.
I'm thinking about the capacity to simply be in a place and become, in a sense, lost in time and space, to be unaffected by commercial or material imperatives, to transcend belonging, citizenship and even identity, to cease to have a history in any sense that this might be either useful or dangerous.
It is the freedom which derives from being present in a functioning society, and yet detached, suspended from it, unburdened by its presumptions or preconditions. The condition I am thinking of is as difficult to describe as it is rare to experience.
Perhaps it has always been like this. But it was striking me as though for the first time, taking my daughter for a walk in Hyde Park last week, that the people of London march to a different beat, not just from us, but from those who purport to speak on behalf of British society.
The sense of weightlessness one picks up from other people, whether they be throwing frisbees, rollerblading to their own whistled soundtrack, feeding the duck, or just swanning about, is actually just a more concentrated occurrence of the feeling one gets generally in London. There is a sense from people that they exist primarily within themselves, that they do not belong to any political entity that might be comprehended by the outsider, that to know this England now, it would be necessary to know, individually, every one of its citizens.
IN PART, I am sure, this feeling has to do with the sheer diversity of humanity that one encounters in even a short walk through a London street or park. One might have thought such diversity would make it difficult to fit in, but the opposite is true. Paradoxically, or perhaps not, it is much easier to feel included here than it is in any part of Ireland.
The issue of fitting in doesn't arise. Nobody cares who you are or where you come from. Nobody requires anyone else's acceptance, so you don't bother to seek it.
Yes, there are plenty of the more orthodox forms of alienation on display in London after 18 years of Thatcherism - plenty of drug pushers, addicts, beggars, homeless people, and sometimes a sense of gratuitous hostility and violence in the air. But most of the time, the primary feeling is a benign one.
It is interesting that the intentionally excluded citizens of the post Thatcher era have now been joined in their banishment by large numbers of the nominally included, who appear to have thrown their caps at the political system. For, above all, what one detects around London is a sense of apoliticisation.
To bring up the subject of British politics in the company of virtually anyone other than politicians or journalists is to be met with blank incomprehension. To walk in off the street, turn on a TV set and hear some politician blathering about begging or homework is to experience a sublime sense of the absurdity of political pretensions.
To bring to London the sense of British society you might pick up from British media, and attempt to employ it in communicating with the people you meet in everyday life would not, to say the least of it, be terribly useful. And in truth, when one considers the decadence and brutalism of British politics, it is only possible to salute anyone who would treat it with indifference.
Mrs Thatcher may have been wrong (again) when she said there was no such thing as society, but she certainly did her bit to make this a self fulfilling prophecy.
What the implications for Irish society might be is difficult to say. Irish politics is becoming every bit as brutalising and ridiculous as the British model, but the sense of detachment one can achieve in London has not been possible in Ireland, partly because of the proximity of politics to everyday existence.
LONDON, for example, is a quite different type of capital city from Dublin of the present day. Dublin is a city consisting of two layers: core and skin, centre and suburbs. London has these as well, but the London you end up in if you arrive there other than for brief trips, while not intending to stay forever, is utterly different in character from any part of Dublin. Dublin is missing perhaps the most important bit of a modern city - the life giving part between the skin and the core.
The second most striking difference is the pattern of people's relationships. In Dublin, indeed in Ireland generally, we take our modus operandi from the village - always striving to become more integrated and involved. In London you create your own community, which then exists separately from everyone else's.
The differences between our cities can tell us a great deal about the difference between our societies, and these differences will make for an interesting study in this, an election year on both sides of the Irish Sea.
Cities are like societies. The street is the model of all technocratic society, for it is there that the natural human freedom seeking tendency is curbed and channelled. A streetscape is really a set of instructions: walk, wait, stop, go, do this, don't do that. Everywhere you look there are signs and lines, signals and instructions.
Modern society builds streets also in our heads. Guided, pushed, nudged and bullied by the codes of prescribed moral, political and economic behaviour, all of us, in effect, live in cities of the mind. The mass media provide the signposts by which we understand how our society works and each of us carries around that map in his or her head.
Thus, in Ireland, it was possible to say that everybody understood how society functioned, and had no real quarrel with the fundamental descriptions and instructions which they received.
No matter where you went around the country, it was possible to plug into this essential understanding of where the essence of the society resided. You felt part of it, you wanted to feel part of it, and sometimes this pressure to be part of it became oppressive to an extent that actually heightened your consciousness of the map, albeit in a negative way.
Everyone was conscious, to quite a high degree, of the proximity of politics and politicians, and the media had a considerable capacity to summon up the public imagination.
All this is changing. Since we copy everything British, the way London feels today will be how Dublin feels in 10 years' time. This knowledge will add a little edge to Irish observation of how Mr Tony Blair deals with the alienation - benign or otherwise - of post political Britain.