Urban Life

As I walked to work yesterday morning I passed these poor guys, having to clean graffiti off a new glazed-tile wall. This is a good example of the type of graffiti that has no value as far as I can see. I'm all for interesting street art in the appropriate place, but we could all do without bad tagging.

It reminded me of a video I stumbled across on YouTube not too long ago by a guy who seems fixated on the idea that European cities and countries are all going downhill. (A common right-wing, Trumpian narrative.) In London, he and his partner wandered around filming every passing police car and homeless person, complaining about dirt, implying that anyone dressed in black on a motorbike is a phone-snatcher, and pointing out a perceived absence of proudly flying Union Jacks. Why I wound up with this video in my feed, I have no idea, but of course it's ridiculous. (He's done a similar video for Lisbon.)

I hesitate to link to his videos and give this guy any more oxygen, but I'll just say that you can walk around filming and exaggerating the ugliest aspects of any city in the world, if you choose to see cities that way. That is not what I see when I walk around London, for the most part. He says someone tried to snatch his phone, which may be true, but in 13 years of living here I've never had that happen, nor do I believe that every guy on a motorbike is a phone thief. (Most of them are food delivery drivers.)

Looking at the photo above, you could say, "Oh, how terrible to have that graffiti problem." Or you could admire the fact that it's being cleaned up.

Do cities have problems? Absolutely. But they always have, going all the way back to Jacob Riis and Jane Addams, and even earlier. Homelessness and poverty and migrants and litter are hardly new phenomena. In fact I'd wager that 100 years ago London was a heck of a lot dirtier than it is now. So yeah, London has changed -- for the better.

I will agree that London has a lot of grotty, unnecessary phone booths that need to be removed. I'm with him on that.

Speaking of litter, I found this on the sidewalk near our school -- an obviously Thanksgiving-themed napkin. It must have come from our school, because Thanksgiving is not a British holiday. I liked the autumnal color scheme!

We only have one more day of school with students, and then a half-day of work tomorrow for so-called professional development before we're off on our Thanksgiving holiday. I mentioned that Dave and I are taking Olga on a little trip -- we're going to back to Bray, a village in Berkshire just outside London that we've visited several times. (It's where we stayed in Clamato Cottage. We didn't get Clamato this time, but we're staying in another similar accommodation.)

I'm wondering what it's going to be like getting Olga out there. It's not a long trip and we can take the train, but at her age, just walking to and from the station is going to be quite an outing!