Jamie Ross: I hate London

I won a Guardian Student Media Award last week.

The benefit of this is that, if you don’t enjoy this column, I will simply dismiss you as being wrong and then unleash my new media power to have you exposed as a Nazi sympathiser who can only achieve orgasm whilst dressed as Idi Amin. The drawback of this is that, as The Guardian selfishly refused to cover the costs of me accepting the award via satellite, I had to spend 16.5 hours in London.

I hate London. I hate anyone who’s ever been to London and I hate anyone who’s ever thought about London. I bet you’re thinking about London right now, aren’t you? Well if I was there I would happily give you a thump in the guts.

Allow me to explain myself, as always, in five simple points.

1. The people: It’s a well-known fact that people who live in London are the most miserable on Earth; the entire population looks like they’re battling through torrential rain regardless of the weather. This is not surprising when you consider the average day of a Londoner. They wake up in a tiny flat with rats crawling over their face, spend an hour on the Underground nestled into a fatfold of a partially-decomposed man, work, then return to their apostrophe-sized flat where a burglar has stolen the telly and scribbled a threat on the wall in shit. A half-existence.

2. The fashion: Every young man in London has selfishly chosen to be far more fashionable than me. When I got off my train in jeans and a hoodie, I could only have felt more like an anachronism if I had turned up in a Shakespearean ruff and codpiece. It’s all very well having an asymmetrical haircut and a quirkily-tailored blazer in your city, Londonfolk, but if I were to dress like you back home I would stick out like David Bowie circa 1972 and, quite rightfully, be hounded out of town.

3. The filth: Anyone who has ever spent any time in my company will be aware that I would rather leave the house with no pants on than without antibacterial hand-gel. As such, London is my own personal nightmare. On the Underground, the oxygen to fart ratio is overwhelmingly unfavourable. On the streets, the glorified sacks of filth who make up the population cough and splutter as if they’re attempting to release a swarm of flies from their mouths like Imhotep in The Mummy. And, all the while, I have to hold my breath and douse my hands with alcoholic gel until it melts my skin and I’m left with a withered little skeleton-claw like Death.

4. The terror: When in London, I spend the vast majority of my time worrying about being mugged or being captured and subsequently auctioned in a sex market. This may be partly because I am a feeble country mouse, but it is more likely to be because I am very perceptive and can tell that everyone who lives in London is hell-bent on a life of debauched crime. Of course, I’ve never experienced any form of crime in London and I’ve not bothered to look at any police statistics but, regardless, they should all be put in prison.

5. The inevitability that I will eventually have to live there: Rural Scotland doesn’t offer many opportunities for wannabe writers, with the exception of branding a farmer’s name onto a cow’s arse. London is home to almost all noteworthy publications. My life, therefore, consists of two inevitabilities – that I will have to live in London and that, one day, I will die – and I treat each prospect with exactly the same level of dread.

I bloody hate London.