Everywhere in the world we can sing the places we live alive. Most of us forget to do this: old cultures sung the land alive through naming it, and remembering those names in stories. What a difference, to live in a living land.
London is so old that the amount of famous things in it – a more obvious naming – are uncountable. They are everywhere, some with good memories – like seeing the 300 000 citizens that protested the cuts in the march I joined (see a previous post) – some bad, like memories of the insane poverty in the middle of huge riches that Victorian London was. Some pivotal – though I can´t think of a more pivotal one than the now lost sandwich shop of Sarajevo that Arturo Princip, the murderer of Archduke Franz Josef went to after trying once to kill the Archduke, then going back, and by accident meeting their car again, this time succeeding in the kill. And with that sandwich, the first grain of sand started rolling that became WWI.
One bus that passes me in the city is one where it´s added to the side that it stops by Abbey Road, where the Beatles had their studio. In Baker Street, there is a museum to Conan Doyle´s detective Sherlock Holmes; he still lives in apartment 221b, Baker Street, London. Watson is even this minute hearing the steps on the stairs that he knows will rouse his friend´s intelligence and skill again after two weeks of laziness and depression. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogpvYQYm_Zw&playnext=1&list=PL16A743C1F7302456
In Camden, there´s a low brick building where the writer Charles Dickens lived for a while when he was a child.
On the city-side of the Thames stands an obelisk of bright stone. If you walk closer, you see that on it are carved ... hieroglyphs. And if you know its story, you would be surprised, because here, constantly passed by traffic, a stones-throw from Embankment station, stands the stolen goods of the conquerors: Cleopatra´s Needle, an Egyptian obelisk 3500 years old. http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/England-History/CleopatrasNeedle.htm It hasn´t been returned, and now, as a final insult, they keep it standing there to be worn down to nothing by ignorant drivers and the fumes from their cars.
In Bloomsbury, near the British Museum, the blue signs of memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_plaque are seen almost everywhere. One of them mentions Lady Ottoline Morell, famous patron of the arts in pre- and post-war England during WWI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Ottoline_Morrell.
Churchill walked here, and in the War Rooms saved Europe from Nazism. Here you can see amazing video of him when he announces the unconditional surrender of Germany that ends WWII: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efvwJjzqKUk&feature=fvsr
In the Tower, Henry the Eight lived out his life and murdered women; outside Houses of Parliament stands, to a sane person´s horror, a statue of Oliver Cromwell, known for being party to a lot of death during his life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell. But countries move on, whether the citizens like it or not, and some criminals they turn to heroes in the beautiful lie that civilization is. There also stands on Parliament Fields a statue of Nelson Mandela – who once was seen as a criminal by those who supported apartheid.
All these places, so many many of them, and so many more places of just ordinary people living out ordinary lives filled with details and sadness and sorrow and joy.
