London in the Wintertime

There is something magical about the city in the dead of winter. After all, this is the place that inspired Charles Dickens in all his fiction (some good, some unbearably bad in my humble opinion) - and indeed, leftover landmarks of his time in London mark various hidden corners of the city. Delicate meshes of lights hang in massive curtains across the Regent Street and Oxford Circus shopping districts, a sight that I have just a glimpsing memory of from my first time in London as a chilly and bundled-up nine year-old in the snowy January of 1985. Men with soot-blackened hands roast chestnuts over open charcoal briquets, and these turned out to be far more delicious burnt open on the cold street corner than they did the one time I found some chestnuts in a supermarket and attempted some version of roasting them over a stove-top flame in my own kitchen.

It's a remarkably dry year here, with a chill that chaps hands and faces and any skin that might escape coverage by scarves and gloves and hats. It's a cold that will freeze your eyeballs to your eyelids when you go outside at night, or at least it feels that way. On a rare cloudy day we actually got the lightest dusting of snow imaginable - so few flakes that you could count them as they came drifting down to rest for a second on the old brick and concrete of the school building before melting away without a trace to mark their passage. I admit that my greatest vice these days is the peppermint hot chocolate they sell only at Starbucks, which is sweet enough to make my teeth itch and rich enough to keep me warm for the walk home. The sun doesn't rise til 8 am, and at roughly the same latitude as southern Alaska, only the western sky is still stubbornly hanging onto the daylight by three-thirty in the afternoon.

In the shortening time I have till classes wind up and I head back state-side to pick up a few weeks of work, I still find that there is so much of the city that I hardly know or have even heard of at all. One day I was out on a dry run of the walk from Euston to Paddington Station (which I will have to traverse by foot on the early morning of my departure to the US, since I will need to be at the station hours before the tube starts running), when I took a wrong turn along a maze of canals and found myself in a hidden corner of town with the self-proclaimed name of Little Venice. And an appropriate name it is, with its picturesque waterways and narrow canal boats parked bumper-to-bumper along the edges. One of these boats had been turned into a cafe, and under the dusky mid-afternoon glow of a rare warmer day, I ducked in and had a warm drink and scone to steel myself for the walk back home. On another lazy afternoon I decided to make an attempt at the transit system that parallels the underground network toward the eastern end of the city, so I boarded the Docklands Light Rail and headed for Greenwich and the famous maritime museum, located next to the final resting place of the sailing ship Cutty Sark. Though the museum pales in comparison to its rival institution in Barcelona, it was still well worth the journey. I stayed into the evening and wandered round a covered marketplace full of foods and crafts and happy holiday people dressed for the blustery winter.

So many places still to see, as the first term of my year here in London comes to a close. I can only imagine that my move back to the US at the end of the summer, Portland will seem drab and dull by comparison.