Never far from Rome III

The River Thames

I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day… […] Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine—what d'ye call 'em?—trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries—a wonderful lot of handy men they must have been, too—used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Approach to London City Airport, 15 November 2024

When visiting family in London if at all possible I choose to fly to London City, a small airport on the river by the old docks which were in the process of being redeveloped when I was a child. The Thatcherite reinvention of the Docklands saw the Thames leap from the melancholic fog-shrouded relic of the Heart of Darkness—the ghost of what was once the busiest port in the world—to an Eighties iteration of the Emerald City.