![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I love my love with an H
Tuesday, 10 August 2010 10:59 amI hate London with an H because it is Hot and Humid. Honestly, I don't expect this from these far northern climes: my clothes stick to me, and the underground is worse than Durban, it's like soup. It seems to be raining this morning, which has cooled things down a bit, but I confidently expeect the soup factor to rise sharply.
I hate London with an H because its H2O is Hard. A bath doesn't leave me feeling clean, it leaves me feeling subtly covered in scales.
I also hate London with an H because it is Horribly Haunted by Hordes. I worry about overpopulation. In London, overpopulation is sitting in your lap. The streams of people are endless, and during rush hour they're shoulder-to-shoulder. Flying into Heathrow always scares me slightly, not just because the city stretches so endlessly beneath you, but because so much of it is so concentrated. Forty-two million little boxes, all tightly packed. I'm not sure people are designed to live like this. But, conversely, I love London with an H because it's Heterogenous - I love the incredible variety of race and culture, the mishmash of accents and languages you'll hear on the tube, or passing you in the street. The announcer on the Waterloo public address system last night had a black South African accent. Creative decontextualisation ftw.
I also love London with an H because it is Happily Historical. I went in to visit![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bumpycat at work yesterday, work being University College London, which is a perfectly familiar university environment plonked down in the middle of the city, weirding me out slightly but conversely also making me feel strangely at home. That area of town is a mishmash of modern and ancient buildings; the bus goes round a corner and there's an eighteenth-century theatre, or Victorian facade, or corner shop with its 1920s front preserved intact. You can see why so many writers write alternative Londons, because they're there, overlaid on each other in these cross-hatched strata which peek through when you're not expecting it. I love it. I was also charmed beyond belief to discover that the founder of UCL had left instructions for his embalmed corpse to be left to the university, posed in suitable garments and on display for lectures and casual passers-by. And there it is, in its little wooden glass-fronted box - minus, apparently, the head, which is fake. Only the Victorians. Only in London.
I am forced to admit that I love London completely without an H for its first-world bandwidth and for shops such as Forbidden Planet, to which Bumpy dragged me having discovered, horrified, that I'd never been there. I now possess Munchkin, and the Ranger expansion (turns monsters into steeds!) in honour of my first D&D character, which should possibly read "my first D&D cliché". I was going to do Foyles this morning, but that was my self-indulgence budget for the trip. I find it strangely appropriate that I spent it on Munchkin instead of the suitable critical tomes I meant to acquire. I Am A Sad Geek and London makes me ambivalent. I love so much of it, but I don't know if I could live here.
I hate London with an H because its H2O is Hard. A bath doesn't leave me feeling clean, it leaves me feeling subtly covered in scales.
I also hate London with an H because it is Horribly Haunted by Hordes. I worry about overpopulation. In London, overpopulation is sitting in your lap. The streams of people are endless, and during rush hour they're shoulder-to-shoulder. Flying into Heathrow always scares me slightly, not just because the city stretches so endlessly beneath you, but because so much of it is so concentrated. Forty-two million little boxes, all tightly packed. I'm not sure people are designed to live like this. But, conversely, I love London with an H because it's Heterogenous - I love the incredible variety of race and culture, the mishmash of accents and languages you'll hear on the tube, or passing you in the street. The announcer on the Waterloo public address system last night had a black South African accent. Creative decontextualisation ftw.
I also love London with an H because it is Happily Historical. I went in to visit
bumpycat at work yesterday, work being University College London, which is a perfectly familiar university environment plonked down in the middle of the city, weirding me out slightly but conversely also making me feel strangely at home. That area of town is a mishmash of modern and ancient buildings; the bus goes round a corner and there's an eighteenth-century theatre, or Victorian facade, or corner shop with its 1920s front preserved intact. You can see why so many writers write alternative Londons, because they're there, overlaid on each other in these cross-hatched strata which peek through when you're not expecting it. I love it. I was also charmed beyond belief to discover that the founder of UCL had left instructions for his embalmed corpse to be left to the university, posed in suitable garments and on display for lectures and casual passers-by. And there it is, in its little wooden glass-fronted box - minus, apparently, the head, which is fake. Only the Victorians. Only in London.I am forced to admit that I love London completely without an H for its first-world bandwidth and for shops such as Forbidden Planet, to which Bumpy dragged me having discovered, horrified, that I'd never been there. I now possess Munchkin, and the Ranger expansion (turns monsters into steeds!) in honour of my first D&D character, which should possibly read "my first D&D cliché". I was going to do Foyles this morning, but that was my self-indulgence budget for the trip. I find it strangely appropriate that I spent it on Munchkin instead of the suitable critical tomes I meant to acquire. I Am A Sad Geek and London makes me ambivalent. I love so much of it, but I don't know if I could live here.
