London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
This… is London.
Today we’re out of the blocks with a simple engineering truth. Two legs wobble. Three legs stand firm. So let’s consider a three-legged stool.
Or possibly a tripod.
Whichever. It doesn’t matter.
It just has to be a something with three legs.
Because, yes, anything with two legs is inherently unstable. A human being, for example. We’re forever making tiny muscular adjustments just to stay upright. Hundreds of them. Thousands probably. Tiny invisible acts of balance. Stop doing them and down you go. Timberrrr.
But three legs. Ah. Three legs are stable.
There’s a reason camera tripods have three legs.
And London Walks, when you think about it, is a kind of tripod.
The first leg is obvious enough. London itself. The city. The streets. The river. The alleyways. The history. The smell of rain on Bloomsbury paving stones. The dome of St Paul’s suddenly appearing at the end of a lane. The fog. The gossip. The murders. The poets. The markets. The pubs. The ghosts.
You can’t have a London Walk without London.
Second leg: the guide.
Again, fairly obvious.
The guide is the interpreter. The conductor. The ringmaster. The conjuror. The one who can make a patch of empty air suddenly fill up with Dickens or Churchill or Jack the Ripper or Virginia Woolf.
But the third leg. The unsung leg. The one people don’t think about.
The walkers.
Honestly, London Walks wouldn’t work – wouldn’t be possible – without them.
Any professional London Walks guide will happily – and gratefully – elaborate on this matter. Especially the Blue Badge guides because they guide for other companies as well. They can compare. And to tell it like it is, London Walks walkers are in a different league.
They’re bright. Curious. Funny. Engaged. Lively. They ask good questions. They make connections. They’re interested in the world.
And one reason for that is a very large percentage of them aren’t tourists.
Lots of Londoners come on London Walks. Ditto lots of Brits from elsewhere in the UK. The chemistry changes completely when that’s the case.
Think about the average tourist experience.
You can spend an entire week in London and never properly meet a Londoner.
Hotel staff? Mostly foreign born.
Uber drivers? Often foreign born.
Restaurant staff? Foreign born.
Museum guards? Foreign born.
Nothing wrong with that, by the way. Quite the reverse. It’s one of the things that makes London London.
But the point is, a tourist can spend a week here and never really connect with anybody local except perhaps a black cab driver.
But come on a London Walk and people start talking to each other.
That’s one of the hidden glories of a walking tour.
People meet.
They compare notes.
They laugh.
Sometimes they become friends.
London Walks has several marriages to its credit.
And no, I’m not making that up.
One of the people I met on a walk was a young man from India named Sechen.
He and his lovely wife have gone back to India now and Mary and I miss them terribly. We were old enough to be their parents but we hit it off famously. They had a marvellous sense of humour. Just fun to be around.
Like me, Sechen is fascinated by history and language.
And one day we were talking about the Raj.
Now let’s not kid ourselves. When the British arrived in India it was one of the wealthiest places on earth. The Brits pretty well picked it clean. Yes, they built railways and legal systems and all the rest of it, but they also bled the place white.
Anyway, Sechen said something I’ll never forget.
He said, “Growing up, in school in India, we were taught the British were just so cruel. My head was full of that. And then I got here and what did I find – they’re all so kind.”
That moved me enormously.
And then, tongue partly in cheek, he came out with one of the funniest lines I’ve ever heard.
He said, “The British are the world’s greatest looters. They even looted the word ‘loot.’”
Wonderful.
And true.
“Loot” started life as a Hindi word.
The world’s greatest looters even looted the word loot.
Well, you can see why I’m fond of Sechen.
Anyway, fast forward to yesterday afternoon.
I was in our local chemist’s. Ramco.
Now Ajit, the pharmacist there, isn’t just my pharmacist. He’s also my librarian.
He’s forever recommending books to me.
Earlier this year he put a huge history book into my hands: The Blood Telegram by Gary Bass. Magisterial, monumental book. About the horrors of East Pakistan in 1971 and the grim role played by Nixon and Kissinger. Eight hundred pages long and absolutely unputdownable.
And from there I went straight into Bass’s next book, Judgment at Tokyo, about the Japanese war crimes trials after World War II.
And there was this extraordinary moment.
Seven Japanese leaders had just been sentenced to death. Sent off to their cells to await hanging.
And what did they do their first night as condemned men?
They wrote haiku.
Poetry.
My jaw was hanging open when I read that.
Anyway, there I was yesterday afternoon in Ramco with Ajit, my phamacist who’s also my librarian, and somehow we found ourselves rappelling up history’s north face together. Or is it rappelling down? I never know.
I told him Sechen’s line about looting the word “loot.”
Ajit smiled.
And then raised the stakes.
He said, “Surely you know the English word ‘thug’ came from India as well.”
Another Hindi or Urdu word.
Same meaning there as here.
So yes, apparently the British also looted the word “thug.”
At which point I was wobbling.
And then Ajit pushed a mountain of red chips into the middle of the poker table.
He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said:
“And of course… doolally.”
London Calling listener, I folded my hand.
Apparently “doolally” comes from Deolali, a town in India where British soldiers and colonial officials who were cracking up in the heat and strain of empire were sent to recuperate.
Go round the bend in India and off you went to Doolally.
Which eventually became “gone doolally.”
Language is extraordinary.
London’s extraordinary.
And this is what I love about the place.
You go to see your pharmacist and come away having traversed empire, linguistics, Japanese death poetry, colonial history, and Victorian slang.
Where else does that happen so naturally?
And that, in its own funny way, brings us right back to the tripod.
London.
Guides.
Walkers.
Take away any one of those three legs and the whole thing topples over.
Because the real treasure of London isn’t just what you see here.
It’s the people you meet here.
And on that note, well, as pilots say, here’s to blue skies and tail winds. For each and every one of you.
See ya tomorrow.