We’re Being Watched

CCTV outside St. Paul's Cathedral

Bridges Crossed: 9/12 (Lambeth, Westminster, Hungerford, Waterloo, Blackfriars, Millennium, Southwark, London, Tower)

Train Stations: 7/10 (Charing Cross, Victoria, Liverpool Street, Waterloo, Paddington, Euston, King’s Cross) 

I made a big dent in my Bridges and Stations checklists this week. Chalk that up to plain old health and determination. I have my health back! I am thrilled to be able to swallow pain-free and to have a body that doesn’t ache. It’s the little things in life that keep me going each day. I joke, but truly, there are few things worse than illness. It’s like a reminder that your own body can turn on you at any moment. I finally made it the National Gallery on Friday and I saw several classic paintings of St. Jerome meditating on mortality by hitting himself with stones and staring at a skull, but I feel like an acute sore throat would have been equally effective.

As I wander through London, usually going in the right general direction but never by the most efficient route, I’m being watched. I read once that the British are the most videotaped people in the world, and just a day in this country will make you believe it. Not only is CCTV everywhere, it is embraced by public and private properties alike. I get the feeling that everyone read 1984 and instead of being appalled by rampant totalitarianism, they thought, “Hey, you know what? That’s a great idea!”

I’m curious if this excessive taping actually results in lower incidences of crime. Possibly property crimes are reduced, which would explain the use of cameras outside entrances and alleyways, but there are also many cameras that just peer into the street. Is anyone monitoring them? There seem to be extensive disclosure laws about CCTV that require it to be announced on trains or posted on walls that taping is occurring, which just makes it all the more ubiquitous.

What is a henge exactly? No one alive know for sure.

On Saturday I went to Stonehenge and Bath. The henge was better than I had been led to expect—you can actually walk quite close to the stones and there is a kind of eerie and mystical sense about the Salisbury plain that wasn’t fully diminished by the herds of tourists taking pictures of the stones from every possible angle. I was one of the click happy masses, and it wasn’t until hours later, as I went through my photos that I realized that I had taken over 50 pictures of rocks.

I went with a tour bus (which I normally would shun), but as it came to the attention of my fellow interns that we all planning on Bath for the same day, I agreed to also buy a ticket for their tour. Organized tours can be nice on occasion; I went on several very fun ones in Thailand with my mom and step-dad, for example. But this one reminded me why I tend to avoid such things. Other than the fact that without the bus, stopping off at Stonehenge would have been difficult, I was completely under-whelmed by the experience. No breaks, no snacks, not enough pamphlets so sharing was militantly enforced, and a tour guide who clearly hated her job and all of us tour attendees passionately. In my experience, buses in non-English speaking countries almost always include snacks. How inhospitable of us!

Moreover, and this was the real crime of the day, we were only afforded a piddling hour and fifteen minutes to “explore” Bath on our own and this was also the first available time to get lunch. So all I really learned about Bath was that one may procure a tolerable baguette sandwich from one of the many street cafés.

The light stones of the characteristic Georgian architecture in Bath reminded me of a northern Italian town. I would like very much to come back to Bath one day with someone that I love and spend several days there. It is not a town for an hour’s viewing.

The Roman Baths. These were silted over when Jane Austen lived here. Her heroines bathed in the King's bath nearby.