London Part III

I watched Sabrina during lunch today. Audrey Hepburn's character falls deeply in love with Paris, and waxes rhapsodic about the City of Lights. I never got it. I went to Paris at seventeen, when a girl should be ripe to fall in love with the romance of rivers and bridges and tree-lined avenues. After a brief stay in a cockroach-infested St. Denis hostlery, we moved on. And I finally fell in love.

With London.

Falling in love with London instead of Paris is like marrying the tech geek instead of living in bohemian squalor with the art major. What can I say? I'm a practical girl. But we practical girls know that the tech geek harbours rivers of passion untapped by most folk.

London is a temple to history and art, commerce and science, medicine and music. It was, for many decades, the center of the world empire. Its clocks set the beat of time for the world. Romans, plague, fire and Huns have taken stabs at this great place but it still stands. Dr. Johnson's dictionary was born here. The world's first blogger, Samuel Pepys lived here.

There is a network of London-lovers all over the world. We recognize each other by brief smiles whenever this movie is mentioned. We are the ones who shudder every time this place is misidentified as London Bridge. We are the ones who secretly harbour the desire to have been married here and to be buried here.

I'm sad today about the bombings, but I know that the two cities attacked today (London and Westminster–there I go again...) will stand as ever.