People who say ‘Landan’ need to stop

London is fluent in 300 languages. Did you know that? 300 different ways to say the rent is too damn high. 300 different ways to say that the Northern Line is totally shite. 300 different ways to say the Olympics were a massive waste of time and money.

But the language you pray nobody speaks, the language you don’t want to hear on the Old Kent Road, or encounter on the streets of Acton, is the wasteman language where ‘Landan’ is a word. I want to believe that people from London do not say Landan. You want to trust the capital’s people to recoil from the word, from the concept, and from everything that Landan stands for.

Because Landan stands for something. And like everything else, that something gets worse. Landan doesn’t exist in isolation. It has an addendum, the people who say Landaan also say Taan. Landan Taan. As in: “just queuing up outside Madame Tussauds in Landan Taan.” “Just popping into M&M World in Landan Taan.” “Just Instagramming a Trafalgar Square selfie with the hashtag #LandanTaan.”

This is Landan, these are the people of Landan:

What happens in these people’s brains? What alchemy compels them – after seeing Big Ben, taking a boat to Greenwich and a totally not stressful walk down Oxford Street – to transform into Danny Dyer? Because that’s what Landan is all about, at heart, Landan is the idea that London hasn’t changed since the Krays were hanging out with Barbara Windsor and Diana Dors.

It’s the idea that in this city round every corner there’s a friendly boozer with a labrador sleeping in front of a fire, full of cockneys eating jellied eels, full of men with faces like Harry Redknapps, lying about being at Wembley to see England win the cup in ’66.  It’s a city the Nazis never stopped bombing, it’s a city the Russians, the Arabs, the Americans, the Israelis never bought up and turned into a network of private penthouses, private banks, private clinics. It’s an agreeable, friendly myth.

People who say Landan are the worst. People who hashtag Landan, the same people, are the worst. If you can’t pay attention to London and what it’s transformed into then you shouldn’t be here. You don’t deserve to be here. You should back home laughing at Eastenders with your parents, adding flat vowels to words because it makes them sound funny.