Rick Senley’s annoyed, and the summer months in the capital are to blame. Suck on this, London:

The overbearing joy of a million smug faces, the elegant limbs of youngsters in love; the reassuring rumble of double deckers and taxis; oh the opera, oh the theatre, oh the heatwave, oh Gordon Ramsey and Prince William and so much culture and Russell Brand and ice cream in Hyde Park and flip-flops on the Tube and smoothies and khaki shorts and Glastonbury nights in the pub and sunburnt paedos and sneezing shits and what a load of old man’s knockers.

London in the summer is hell. London in the autumn is dreary. London in the winter is dispiriting and London in the spring is pointless. But London in the summer is hell, pure unabridged, undiluted, unwashed hell.

Regent’s Park open air season and Wimbledon, braying nincompoops, loud and red on Pimm’s, bulbous-nosed halfwits in pastels and awful trousers, Americans smeared with Starbucks, looking for London, looking for England, looking for Pizza Hut and quaint little Garfunkel’s and Spanish teenagers louder than the Tube, French kissers and Romans impossibly bright and confident and happy in their new playground, the National Gallery and Oxford Street, Oxford effing Street, no one’s from London these days, where have they all gone? then back to Oxford Street and its gawping monstrosities snaffling waffles and fumes looking for love and bargains too so I try to get away from it all, escape the bastard lot of them and I push and shove them out of the way, knees in the back of left-hand escalator riders, my first smile of the day; gormless families from Bromley, shopping and looking, looking and stopping, shopping and blabbering, maps, tickets, toilet.

I seek solace in a noodle bar. A fat cockney squelches chow mein into his mobile, pork down his chin, mushrooms all over his Charlton top.

A Japanese couple play with their teeth, pulling at fetid strands of food over the table in pocket mirrors and a fellow of indeterminable age, nationality and gender plumps for beef and onion. I put my fingers in my ears to block out the fat bleating boasts but don’t hear the waitress ask for my order so I wait twenty minutes and stamp to the counter, claiming I’m peckish then I realise that all isn’t too bad in the end when I look at the chap to my right, the despair and gloom on his face as one by one he removes the onions from the beef and places them on the floor, chopsticks ever so neat and tidy, his eyes misting over until he stands up and walks away, his shoulders beaten down to nothing by the cruel thumps of life.