Taylor Swift may have recently evaded the reputation of being an Aryan wet dream in her sudden advocacy for the marginalized, but, at the same time, her fetish for Anglicans doesn’t quite stay in line with said promulgation. Hence, we have one of the more beloved tracks on Lover, “London Boy,” inspired by Joe Alwyn. Or Tom Hiddleston. Or Harry Styles. The point is, clearly she loves pale British dick. Yet not enough to respect the laws of plausible geography in the supposedly (crudely drawn) heart-shaped map of touring London she has created. At first, there is a touch of reason to it, like a commute from Camden to Highgate, a roughly twenty minute bus ride from Kentish Town Road. But things start to devolve around the time she ends up in Brixton for the night and then plans to be in Shoreditch by the following afternoon. If she’s going to get as pissed as an average Brit (or a below average one as well), even her plucky, still under thirty ass wouldn’t be prepared in such a hungover state for the forty-minute Tube ride it takes to get there–and we’re assuming she’s trying to be as “of the people” as possible and not resort to a chauffeured car. Like Kevin McCallister. An Anglo equally as unfond of adhering to geographic reality in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.
Of course, Kevin doesn’t bother setting the bar very high on plausibility from the outset when he lands at LaGuardia and has a practically “I can touch the city” view of Midtown. Isn’t fucking real. Just like Kevin managing to finagle his way into the Plaza. Where he still feels inclined to take a limo for the two minute walk it would have been to get to Duncan’s Toy Chest–which is, obviously, based on FAO Schwarz. Even in its new subpar location at 30 Rockefeller, it still would have taken Kevin a mere eleven minutes to walk there. Surely far less time than sitting in traffic, even if he does love his pizza-filled limo rides. To further add to the geographical incongruities, we’re expected to believe that Kevin has to run almost a full mile from The Plaza, where he’s briefly cornered by Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern) before running all the way to Bethesda Terrace in Central Park to get away from them. That’s an obscene amount of running. Surely, out of shape Harry and Marv, without the metabolisms to absorb pizza and ice cream as seamlessly as ten-year-old Kevin, could have been evaded within a .1 mile radius. Other magical traveling abilities Kevin appears to have is managing to get from Carnegie Hall to St. Anne’s Hospital for Children on West 120th Street in a flash. Though it’s actually seventy-five blocks away. He also seems to teleport when running from Duncan’s Toy Chest, once again located on 5th Avenue near The Plaza, all the way to his uncle’s apartment on 51 West 95th Street. That’s 2.2 miles reduced to Kevin simply turning one corner to get to the apartment with the former Wet Bandits turned Sticky Bandits in hot pursuit.
So yes, maybe Taylor, in her current New York-centric phase (she also has a song called “Cornelia Street” on Lover) was watching Home Alone 2 with Joe Alwyn around the time the seeds of the “London Boy” lyrics were sown. Infected with the Kevin McCallister disease of choosing to totally disregard logic and reason when it comes to creating an authentic sense of the city’s topography. What’s more, most people who aren’t arsehole businessmen do not enjoy drinking in the afternoon in Soho nor does anyone choose to go from Shoreditch to Highgate to Hackney (the latter clearly being a grudging move on Swift’s part, who so obviously prefers the overpriced options on Bond Street despite insisting she doesn’t yet mentioning it more than once).
To add insult to injury, Swift seems to have no regard for the one British cultural cliche that might have spared Alwyn from this highly embarrassing song: Brits are deadpan stoics who hate bathetic displays of affection. Alas, like Boris Johnson’s birth, the damage has been done. In any event, is it just this listener or does it seem like Swift is only fanning further flames for the British to believe their shit don’t stank and they ought to just defect from the rest of Europe, nay, the world?
