Part of my study abroad trip to London and Rome in September is a series of blog posts about some assigned readings, and reflections upon them. This is the seventh such post, and is one of one about Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.
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 pollution 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 step 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.
– except from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House
London has always had this weird dichotomy between how it is described in words, like those of Dickens above, and how it shows up on screen in movies and on TV. Books and stories always describe this grey, drizzly, wet world of fog and filth and grime. Films and television seem to show a bright, sunny, mostly clean, non-foggy, rarely even cloudy city.
Took me years to catch on that so much of what I was seeing on screen in BBC programs, that was being labelled as “London”, was often actually being filmed at BBC studies in Belfast, Glasgow, Cardiff, or Manchester.
That said, from looking at weather forecasts, it looks like September is going to be a bit of a drizzly month and prone to light rain. Going to be a change, heading from Portland, OR to England and London which is closer to Seattle in latitude, and then south to Rome in Italy and being almost tropical. Actually kind of hard to figure out what, and how, to pack for it all.