Read Dickens and then go, explore London.
Suddenly, the fog will not only cover the Thames, it will suffocate it, smother, shroud it. It will blur the lines of politics and muffle the whispers of uprising emanating from Parliament. It will drown the great river itself, clamour at Westminster Bridge and blanket that point where Wordsworth composed his great poem. Everything will be still, apart from the fog. The fog that rolls, solemnly, up the Thames.
Adjectives will crash around your head like waves thrashing angrily against each other. You’ll suddenly see London as Dickens did, every motion intensified, every detail picked out.
A night time walk through the great City of London will take on a certain eeriness, as Scrooge’s ghosts whisper at you from the same ancient streets the old miser walked himself. When you pass St Michael’s church at Cornhill, the bell will ring; the noise so shrill that it’s like its teeth are ‘chattering in its frozen head’. A drawn out ‘brrrrrrring, brrrrrrring’ across the icy city, leaving a faint echo in the frosted air.
And the markets! The markets will come to life: plump pheasants with iridescent feathers will hang outside butcher stalls; nuts will shine like small bombs in wicker baskets and dates, so big and sweet, will sing of the East. There will be a frenzy of people, rushing this way and that against the burgeoning crowds, getting no where fast, but not seeming to mind too much at all.
Go now, tuck yourself up in bed with ‘Great Expectations’, ‘Bleak House’, or better yet his most famous novel, ‘A Christmas Carol’. Get lost in the descriptions and – if you can – come and experience his world yourself, or if you can’t find your own Dickens’ Victorian London, don’t worry…there’s always our imaginations…..
To The Table 
WOW Alice, what amazing writngs, you make it all come alive. I was almost there in the fog, Not much fog around these parts, most in the early mornings when it’s so beautiful .From our back veranda we look over our own hills and dales and the fog lies in the dales and shows the hills usualy with the sun shining through it all. it’s all sp pretty but that beauty usualy means it’s going to be a very hot humid day, but thats what Queenslad is all about.The fog in the winder is different as it’s more like a heavy dew and through the night the spiders seem to know to weave some beautiful webs everwhere, which are covered with the dew in the morning sunlight. just majic to look at.
Take care and looking forward to your next ‘writing’s’
Auntie Pauline
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