Westminster Bridge

Earth has not anything to show more fair …

…begins William Wordsworth’s “Westminster Bridge” sonnet, and we got lucky with a beautiful morning when we went out to film our introduction to London across from Big Ben.

Filming begins: Day 1, The Serpentine

Swimming with Byron

I’ve been in London the past two days. Today I went with two student interns and filmed our first scene at The Serpentine in Hyde Park. Harriet Westbrook Shelley, the poet’s first wife, drowned there in 1816. Less than a month later, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin were married. Some might see the speed as monstrous. Mary had already written the first draft of Frankenstein by then, so that might be the right adjective.

Harriet was buried under a false name and the suicide was covered up. It was a sad, anonymous end all too common in early 19th-century England. She was pregnant with another woman’s child when she died. Fallen, abandoned, and despairing.

The filming was surreal, since it turned sunny at The Serpentine and people on a charity walk were crowding all around us. One of the themes became Harriet’s forgotten death in England’s literary history…

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Hackney(ed) in Stoke Newington

I’ve spent two days in Daniel Defoe’s world now. Most of it’s gone, so it’s taken some looking. Defoe was a modern man, so it only makes sense that most of his world’s been demolished, and only some of it by German bombs in World War II. It’s been bulldozed for progress for the most part.

Bicycles near Bunhill Fields.

Back to the mother country in a few weeks

I’ve been trying to pivot from family matters to preparation for my upcoming trip to London and France. I’m finally starting to focus a little better on what’s coming up.

First, a few days in Stoke Newington, where I’ll be filming sites that were important in Daniel Defoe’s life for a documentary film I’m working on. I’ll also do some filming at places where he stood in the pillory, and at the Museum of London (where Newgate Prison is somewhat represented).

Writing on the road

I’m trying to keep my routines going despite all the moves and changes. Writing’s the most important one. The blog’s been easy to get to. Pictures, travels, stuff to write about.

But I’ve also been forcing myself to write in my hotel rooms, and it’s worked surprisingly well. I got up at 7 both yesterday and today and wrote for an hour. I’ve got my protagonist walking a London street. I left him and another character somewhere on the sidewalk between the British Library and Euston Station. It’s early March, gray skies, but the rain’s holding off so far.

I hope it does the same on the road today, but don’t think I’ll be that lucky.

Now, on toward Jersey.