London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
—————————————
And a very good evening to you. From London. It’s August 5th, 2024.
Today’s pin…well, this one’s yesteryear’s pin. Two yesteryears. And it really appeals to me. It was this day, August 5th, 2012 that Usain Bolt, the Jamaican superstar sprinter, won the 100 metres race at the London Olympics. And he did so in some style…he beat the record he set in the 2008 Olympics. And how about this for a choice coincidence, the Jamaican superstar raced to glory on the eve of the anniversary of Jamaica gaining its independence from the United Kingdom. |After more than 300 years under British control. In 1962, at midnight on this day the Union Jack flag was lowered and the new flag of independent Jamaica was unfurled and hoisted. Usain Bolt was the presiding genius of the 2012 London Olympics and the timing – that’s timing in both senses of the word – of his 100 metres race to glory was perfection in itself.
—————————-
Moving on, today’s Random – who are these people? How do they look at themselves in the mirror in the morning? This bit of nastiness has probably been visited on quite a few of you. It’s one of the scourges of our times.
I switched on one of the London Walks computers this morning, to be greeted by an email sent to London Walks purporting to have been sent from London Walks. The charming contents of the email said something like “you’ll have noticed this email has been sent to you from you. That means you’ve got an uninvited passenger, riding along with you. I can see what you’re doing. I can see you. I can switch on the camera on your computer. You have 48 hours to send me 1500 dollars in Britcoin. If you don’t send me the money I’ll send all of your contacts a video that you’re not going to want them to see – a video of you watching a pornographic site and ‘pleasuring yourself’ – as he so charmingly put it. Well, no such video exists, needless to say. Nor do we visit pornographic sites. Ever. So, yes, it’s yet another scam. But I learn from a friend that 3.1 billion of these pfishing scams get sent out every day. Incredible. Who are these people? Where are they? Why can’t they be rounded up and dealt with. I have friends who describe themselves as traditional old left-wing, liberal, tolerant, progressive, softies and they freely admit that this scourge releases in them impulses – even yearnings – they didn’t know they had and which are contrary to their every instinct. One such friend says, “I’d have them lined up against the wall and shot – just like that the world would be a better place.”
I’m a little more lenient. I’d give them the Clockwork Orange treatment. Remember the character Alex in the Anthony Burgess novel – and the Stanley Kubrick film – A Clockwork Orange. A teenage psychopath living in a near-future dystopia, Alex – he of the distinctive white outfit, black top, eye makeup and taste for classical music – Alex roams the streets with his friends going in for lots of general violence and causing no end of mayhem and destruction.
Well, Alex fought the law and the law won. He’s strapped to a chair, his eyes are clamped open and he’s injected with drugs. He’s then forced to watch films of sex and violence – films of sex and violence accompanied by the music of his favourite composer, Beethoven.
That’s the sentence I’d hand down to the scammers. Except maybe instead of their being forced to watch pornographic films I’d have them watching – and reading – non-stop, over and over again, their scam email.
Anyway, that’s how August 5th got underway for us. The scam email comes in – a stupid, moronic bid to blackmail us – and I’m thinking, ‘pal, whoever you are out there, I’d give half my library – and that’s really saying something given that I suffer from an incurable case of bibliomania – I’d give half my library to have you and your ilk well and truly Alex’d. And you’d be thanking your lucky stars that it was me who caught up with you first. Because if it had been my liberal, progressive, tolerant, softie pal who got to you first you’d be in for a much stickier end. You wouldn’t even get a blindfold from him.
————t———————
Cue today’s Ongoing. Well, there’s no putting your head in the sand about the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim riots. Unrest fanned by disinformation from the far right.
This too will pass. It’ll be put down. Bottled up. And it’s nothing new, this country’s been here before. London’s very much on the sideline. Highly unlikely that we’re going to have any firsthand experience of it here. So no frontline report from this quarter. Instead, something highly personal, something offbeat.
Highly personal – as usual, I watch the news, read the newspapers and all the while I’m monitoring my own personal response and as is so often the case with me, Shakespeare comes to mind.
In this instance, the greatest speech in a play called The Book of Thomas More. Shakespeare didn’t write the play but he made a contribution to it. Some contribution. It’s the greatest speech in the play. For the record, the play was banned by the Queen’s censor. It was never performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime. There was a lot of anti-immigrant unrest at the time. Many French protestants – Huguenots – had sought asylum in the capital. They were the boat people of late 16th century London. They were resented – more than resented, there were anti-immigrant riots, sound familiar? – by some not all ordinary Londoners. It was the card that always gets played. Xenophobia, hatred and fear of the outsider, the foreigner, those who are different. They didn’t say it in so many words, but the rioters were saying, send them back where they came from, we want our country back. For the record, Shakespeare at the time was living in Silver Street, the main immigrant neighbourhood in Elizabethan London. He lived with the Mountjoys, a French Huguenot family. He was their lodger. He wrote three of his masterpieces while he was living there: King Lear, Measure for Measure and Othello. Othello of course is his great tragedy about the ultimate outsider: a man not just from a different country, a different culture but a man also a man set apart because of the colour of his skin. Othello is from North Africa. He’s a Moor.
Anyway, to cut to the chase, in the world of the Thomas More play it’s May 1, 1517. A London mob is rioting and attacking immigrants. Thomas More confronts them.
Oh and I should add that the Elizabethans didn’t use the word immigrants. Their word for them was strangers. Here’s the speech. It’s powerful, it’s beautiful, it’s generous, it’s humane. In a word, it’s civilised. It’s the opposite of mindless thuggery, the opposite of barbaric, reptilian iniquity and depravity. It’s Shakespeare – and this country, this culture – at its best.
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silenced by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reason, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Feed on one another.…
You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in line
To slip him like a hound. Alas, alas, say now the King,
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you: whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleas’d
To find a nation of such barbarous temper
That breaking out in hideous violence
Would not afford you an abode on earth.
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owned not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But charter’d unto them? What would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com –
home of London Walks,
London’s signature
walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size
walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it,
London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science:
you get what you pay for.
And just as surely,
you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started
we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question:
Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world
you do whatever you have to do
to attract and keep
the best guides in London –
you want them guiding for you,
not for somebody else.
Bears repeating:
the way we’re structured –
a guides’ cooperative –
is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following,
a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases
distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor
(and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated –
Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa –
both of them CBEs –
are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z,“internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star team of guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former Museum of London archaeologist, historians,
university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes
criminal defence lawyers,
Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors,
a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)…
well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament,
every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar
and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…
come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning
one and all. See ya next time.