In the last couple of weeks, London has become especially horrible. It is now dark from 3:30 in the afternoon, until 8:30 in the morning; and even those seven hours of “daylight” are nothing more than a damp grey twilight.
Intermittent drizzle, cold winds, electric lights still on in the middle of the day.
The streets are still busy, as they always will be in London - but the crowds are doing their best not to be there. People hurry from home to work, work to supermarket, supermarket to home, with those grim, determined London faces. Even the local teenagers who hang around stealing our bikes don’t seem to be enjoying it much any more.
In the background to all this, is the rising tide of Christmas idiocy. I see the festival now as a very northern-hemispherical invention, a sort of compensation to help people through the long dark night of their northern souls. The world may have turned into a post-apocalyptic miasma - but at least we can stuff ourselves with fatty food, get drunk, and exchange silly plastic baubles.
Comments 4
Oh for goodness sake! Winter in England is beautiful. Frost covered trees. London lights in the fog. Everything washed clean and radiant with the light crisp mists. Festive cheer by warm glowing hearths. (Pretty much like summer in England actually, without the cheer.) Christmas idiocy may be northern-hemispherical, but have you been in a Aussie-London pub recently? You guys seem to be having your own fair share of “joy to the world”. At least we keep our clothes on.
Posted 21 Dec 2006 at 1:43 pm ¶And you’re definitelt off the Christmas present list, Mansfield!
Posted 21 Dec 2006 at 1:44 pm ¶Definitely!
Posted 21 Dec 2006 at 1:45 pm ¶Well it’s nice now that we’re into proper winter - I’ve been very pleased since the real cold has started.
What I didn’t like was October and November, when it was damper and darker.
Posted 22 Dec 2006 at 1:29 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
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