Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on a London Winter in Early Evening)

“The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.” —English novelist-essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (1942)

Quote of the Day (Harley Jane Kozak, on an American Adrift in London’s October Fog)

“The October day was murky with fog. And cold. I was wearing Robbie’s red rain slicker, but it wasn’t enough. How’d I get roped into doing this favor-turned-into-an-enigma-wrapped-in-a–Twilight Zone episode? Robbie had a lifetime of practice getting me to do stuff he didn’t like doing—pet immigration in this case—but I’d had the same lifetime of practice saying no. Yet here I was, and minus the pet in question. How had it happened? What had happened? And why? And where was my damned brother? Seriously, what was I supposed to do? Call 911? Was the number even 911 in England? And then what? I wasn’t one to chalk things up to supernatural forces, but it was a stretch to assume a criminal act. What self-respecting thief would want a plump, elderly cat? And why leave in her place this wheezing dog, straining at his makeshift leash, pulling me through London?”—American actress-turned-crime fiction writer Harley Jane Kozak, “The Walk-In,” in The Best American Mystery Stories 2019, edited by Jonathan Lethem (2019)

Photo of the Day: The Clock “In the Middle of the Town”

"How can you ever be late for anything in London? They have a huge clock right in the middle of the town." —Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Kimmel Live, March 5, 2013

I took the photo accompanying this post in late January 2013, on a short but intense business trip to London. But Big Ben began operating on this date a long time before that—on this date in 1859, to be exact. 

At the time, it embodied the latest in clock technology—and it still happens to be awfully good in that regard. But nowadays, it’s also seen--rightly--as an architectural landmark.

Photo of the Day: London’s River Thames, ‘At His Own Sweet Will’

“Never did sun more beautifully steep

   In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

   The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

   And all that mighty heart is lying still!”— William Wordsworth, “Upon Westminster Bridge, Composed September 3, 1802”

I took this photograph of the River Thames from a bus three years ago, when I was visiting London on a very short business trip.

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on London’s ‘Implacable November’ Fog)

“Implacable November weather….Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun….

“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.”— Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

Quote of the Day (Noel Coward, on London)

“I don't know what London's coming to — the higher the buildings the lower the morals.”—Noel Coward, Collected Sketches and Lyrics

Photo of the Day: London’s Canary Wharf, Morning

Several weeks ago, I posted a nocturnal photo of Canary Wharf, the London business and shopping district. But it looks far different in the morning, so I thought I would present this additional shot, taken in the last 24 hours of my business trip—a cold, but bright, mid-winter day.