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London Walks – 1

Botolph Alley, London

Every time I come to London I find it mysterious. When I go by taxi from Euston to elsewhere in the early hours of the morning, the streets and people look so strange. It’s like they’ve just stopped being someone else, and are now becoming someone they are going to be until dusk. As I ride past, I see them gradually turning into clerks, executives, cleaners, and students, while at night they were all seducers and innocentis, pagans who dance and sing their sacred hymns in crowded neon temples and dedicate every act of copulation to the Almighty Deity that is thought to endow you with eternal youth and freedom.

Westminster, London

I have always used to stay in a different part of London. The first time there I lived in a student hostel in Fitzroy Street; the second – in a friend’s flat at Beckenham Junction; then in a hotel in Sussex Gardens, with the Hyde Park just down the road;then in South Kensington; then again in Sussex Gardens, again close to the Park. I don’t know where I stay next time, but my dream is to spend the entire night walking in the streets. I’ve walked in London until early hours of the night, but never in the early hours of the morning.

I love this London’s mystery because I am a dreamer. Where you normally find sleep-walkers, in me you find someone fascinated by illusions. They are not hallucinations; they are illusions of what is around me, and what I see happening. This is why I write, and this is also why I love cinema. I cherish the dream of immersing myself into the bowels of this monster, the city that many people fear so passionately, deny so resolutely, and admire so grudgingly.

© Julia Shuvalova 2006 (additions 2009)

Author: Julia Shuvalova

Julia Shuvalova is the author of Los Cuadernos de Julia blog. She is an author of several books, a translator, and a Foreign Languages tutor. She lives and works in Moscow, Russia.

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