"I came up now at Tower Hill, and there wasn't a tower and there wasn't a hill."

There's this bloke called Bill Bryson. He's an American who lived in England for 20+ years and has written a collection of memoirs on this country he grew to love so much. Tori gave me one of these books, Notes from a Small Island, Christmas of 2008, long before I knew that I would be studying here. I started to read it this past Christmas, hoping it would prepare me for some of the culture that I was about to encounter. Today, whilst researching for a paper I am writing for my "British Life & Culture" class, I picked it up and decided to skim over it a bit and see if there were anything I could use. I'm not sure I can incorporate any of the material to my essay, but I thought I'd share a little segment with you. As a disclaimer, I want to add that this book is twice as funny after having lived here for a little while. Anywho. Have a laugh! Or as they say in Ireland, have a good craic!

I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhere but New York--and even New York can't touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theaters, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more courteous inhabitants than any other large city in the world. 

And it has more congenial small things--incidental civilites, you might call them--than any other city I know: cheery red mailboxes, drivers who actually stop for you at pedestrian crossings, lovely forgotten churches with wonderful names like St. Andrews by the Wardrobe and St. Giles Cripplegate, sudden pockets of quiet like Lincoln's Inn and Red Lion Square, interesting statues of obscure Victorians in togas, pubs, black cabs, double-decker buses, helpful policemen, polite notices, people who will stop to help you when you fall down or drop your shopping, benches everything. What other great city would trouble to put blue plaques on houses to let you know what famous person once lived there, or warn you to look to your left or right before stepping off the curb? I'll tell you. None. 

Take away Heathrow Airport, the weather, and any building that the architect Richard Seifert ever laid a bony finger to, and it would be nearly perfect. Oh, and while we're at it, we might also stop British Museum employees from cluttering the forecourt with their cars and instead make it into a kind of garden, and also get rid of those horrible portable crush barriers outside Buckingham Palace because they look so straggly and cheap--not at all in keeping with the dignity of her poor besieged Majesty within. And, of course, put the Natural History Museum back to the way it was before they started dicking around with in (in particular, they must restore the display case showing insects infesting household products from the 1950s); and remove the entrance charges from all museums at once; and bring back Lyons Corner Houses but this time with food you'd like to eat; and finally, but most crucially, make the board of directors of British Telecom go out and personally track down every last red phone box that they sold off to be used as shower stalls and garden sheds in far-flung corners of the globe, make them put them all back, and then sack them--no, kill them. Then truly will London be glorious again.

That's all for now. Katie and I are going to attempt to find a place to capture the Volcanic sunset. It's a gorgeous day in London!  Hope it is gorgeous wherever you are.

Love,
lvp