Day 50. The End.

“So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, good bye.” Well, gang, my time in London has come to an end. In 24 hours I will be at Heathrow Airport checking my bags, praying that they are not overweight, and then going through security and then waiting, waiting, waiting.
London has been amazing. I have seen things I never dreamed I would see. I have enjoyed every moment of it. There have been high times and hard times, but that’s the way it goes. I found this in one of my notebooks from a particularly bad day:
“I am living my dream and finding that my dream is not what I thought it would be. London is an experience, it is true, but not the one I would have chosen. I am continually disappointed, wishing for the London that I held on a pedestal. The London of Austen, of Radcliffe, of Bronte, of Dickens, of Shakespeare. The London of the Regent, of Waterloo, of Elizabeth, and Victoria. But that London is gone. The buildings are shells of what used to be, and if you keep your eyes looking up, you can almost imagine it. But you cannot look up forever, and then your reality sets in. The buildings you imagined fine lords and ladies inhabiting are now apartments above shops like RadioShack or Marks and Spencer or Anne’s Antiques. There are cars along the street and trucks humming along, nearly knocking you from your construction worked-over uneven walkway. People bustle by, not in their fine clothes or with their fine manners, but with their crass language and cigarettes, talking on cell phones and hardly noticing where they are walking. ‘This is not right,’ I think. ‘This is all wrong.’ It is too loud, too crowded, too dirty. Where are the carriages and footmen, the horses and stable hands? Where are propriety and manners and honor and chivalry? It is all too much, this London I am living in. Too much of what I have long hated all thrown into the sludge of shattered illusions and broken expectations. When did prices reach so high that you wince over a baguette? When did a lack of oxygen become commonplace in favor of smoke and exhaust and alcohol? When did mouths begin to venture where no respectable ear should endure?
This man used to live here, but now it is a car park. This writer wrote here, but now it houses an adult store. This artist is buried near here, but we can’t remember where. This church was once purely from the 10th century, but then it was a stable, but is now restored.
Used to be. But now. Near here. Once was. Don’t they realize what a legacy was to be had? “Have [they] no perception of what [they] have lost?” What is preserved and what is not? Where will tourists go and how much money can we make from them?
But what about the rest of us? We who are merely pilgrims seeking for what our imaginations had conjured up and treasured? “All that glitters is not gold.” Tarnish glitters, too. A feeble attempt, but a glitter all the same. My treasure is nothing more than that of a Cracker Jack box—a trite imitation, cheap and crude and not worth as much as the packaging it came in. Potential is everywhere, but it is left untapped.
Perhaps it is my fault. I should not expect so much from a place that must change with the times and alter as necessity dictates. Did I expect my imaginations to exist in reality, that what I wanted actually mattered to this place? My pedestal was too much, too high, too lofty, and there was nothing for it but to topple over and clatter upon the marble floor of the vault of my mind. My pilgrimage has changed me, though how I still cannot quite tell. There is still magic here, I am still drawn, but I also look back, more frequently with each day. Back to where I could dream and wonder and pretend that what I wanted existed and where my pedestals were of a respectable height of no great consequence. But Frodo was right: “There is no going back”. My imaginations have been eroded by reality. “Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.”

“Yet hope remains”! For in the wild not-so-hallowed halls of my mind, the imagination still roams free and reigns supreme. I can cast off this dirty, smelly, dingy shroud of this place and change it to a delicate, clean, innocent veil of something else. For what have we, if we cannot have dreams? “What would be the point of living if we could not dream? Life would be dull!” And though I am many things, dull is not one of them. So onward, ye daydreamers, ye artists and inventors and writers and wishers! “Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection. The lovers, the dreamers, and me.” Tallyho!”

But let us remember what has been done:
Shows seen: 7
Universities visited: 3
Trips taken: 15
Chocolate consumed: No comment
Tubes rides: A whole lot
Friends made: 42
Lives changed: 1

London, thank you for housing me, sheltering me, enriching me, and showing me a part of the world that I never knew existed. Thanks for the waffles, the Indian food, the charity shops, the souvenir shops with scary foreign men, the sights, the sounds, not the smells, the accents, the palaces, and seeing random celebrities like Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Sean Connery, the woman who plays Caroline Bingley in the A&E Pride and Prejudice, the woman who plays Mrs. Elton in the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma, and the woman who plays Jane in the A&E Pride and Prejudice.Thank you, London. I’ll never forget.