I would hesitate to call it the blitz, but being in London right now does have an eerie isolation to it. The skies are crystal clear (although a colleague tells me he found a layer of fine gray ash on his car yesterday morning) and remarkably quiet. The flight-every-30-seconds normality in London is broken, and I find that I am woken by Big Ben and Westminster chimes each day from the real Big Ben, almost two miles away from Endsleigh Court, where I have a small (and I do mean small) flat for the month. At a party thrown by Paul Longley last night for the people involved in organizing the GISRUK (GIS research UK) meeting that concluded Friday, there were several people who were unable to fly home, and may not be able to until well into next week. My daughter, who planned to join me here for a book show at Earl’s Court next week, has canceled her trip entirely.
London is packed to the seams and is under both a period of intensive renovations to the public infrastructure (underground lines and even major stations are often closed all weekend; Oxford street is torn up from one end to the other) and an election campaign. I arrive home each day to a new set of brochures inviting me to “Vote Tory” for the first time (they have been out of power now for many years), and the buzz on the “telly” is that the Liberal-Democrat “third” party is in with a chance after a sterling performance by their man in the first televised debate.
Meanwhile life goes on. Spring is turning the trees slowly green, and every window box is full of tulips and daffodils. I pause each day as I pass the plaque across the street marking the spot where 13 people died on a bus on 7/7/05. I spent yesterday catching up with my family on Hampstead Heath. My sister is interested in genealogy, and was delighted to have found a gravestone at St. Johns-in-Hampstead church with dates for three descendents of my grandmother. Not 30 feet away, I was amazed to find the tomb of John Harrison, inventor of the chronometer and of “Longitude” fame. That’s London all over, wherever you look carefully, there is another surprise. And this week’s surprise is that a volcanic eruption in far away Iceland can bring this churning metropolis to a grinding halt, and a million unforeseen consequences trickle down to one and all.
Keith Clarke
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