Romance and murder, the Victorian Way

London still wears its Victoriana on its sleeve. It's much more visible where I live, one of the villages enveloped by The City's growth and expansion. The first major permanant buildings are Victorian Row houses, before that this was all farmland. The only real change occurred during the Blitz when one wayward bomb fell across the street from where I live. That's why I have to look at ugly post-war architecture when I wake up in the morning.

Anyway, the point it, for all its attempts to be a major modern city, London is stuck at the turn of the last century. You can feel it when you walk from the busy streets into the parks and gardens, you can see it when you walk down Tottenham to my street- both lined with Victorian row houses, and you can smell it every now and again when the Victorian sewers act up after a rain.

Sometimes I'm amazed that I don't have to avoid carriages and people throwing out the contents of chamber pots from their open windows. Or maybe I just have a romantic imagination that runs away with me.

Completely unrelated, I'm in the public library again and if the man behind me doesn't stop rustling his plastic bags I'm going to stab him.

In the Victorian period this would be perfectly acceptable as long as I took the trouble of dumping his body in a river (preferably the Thames but more likely one of its tributaries (now they're all underground)). How's that for romantic.