My trip to London – possibly my favourite city in the world – is a bit oddly (or cleverly, as some would say) timed. It’s sandwiched right between the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the 2012 London Summer Olympics. And so a host of timely articles about the city are popping up all over the place. There are some, like A.A. Gills’s piece for The New York Times, that I read, re-read and then bookmarked for passages like the one below. So when I do visit in about a month’s time, I’ll remember and won’t forget about the kinds of things you forget to experience when you’re caught up in the excitement of it all.
‘You need to see London at night, particularly the theaters. But not just the night life. London itself looks best in the dark. It’s a pretty safe city, and you can walk in most places after sunset. It has a sedate and ghostly beauty. In the crepuscular kindness, you can see not just how she is, but how she once was, the layers of lives that have been lived here. Somebody with nothing better to do worked out that for every one of us living today, there are 15 ghosts. In most places you don’t notice them, but in London you do. The dead and the fictional ghosts of Sherlock Holmes and Falstaff, Oliver Twist, Wendy and the Lost Boys, all the kindly, garrulous ghosts that accompany you in the night. The river runs like dark silk through the heart of the city, and the bridges dance with light. There are corners of silence in the revelry of the West End and Soho, and in the inky shadows foxes and owls patrol Hyde Park, which is still illuminated by gaslight.
- A.A. Gill in “My London, and Welcome to It,” The New York Times, April 2012.
