TODAY is National Wordsmith Day. Not convinced? Well with good reason, because it’s also National Paranormal Day, National Chocolate Custard Day, National Lumpy Rug Day and National Two Different Coloured Shoes Day (these are all actual national days, by the way). Let’s give the chocolate custard and lumpy rugs a miss and have a look at what the nation’s favourite wordsmiths have to say about London. In no particular order here’s our top ten.
1) You are now in London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow at once is deaf and loud, and on the shore vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more. Yet in its depth what treasures! – Percy Bysshe Shelley
2) I don’t know what London’s coming to – the higher the buildings the lower the morals. – Noël Coward
3) The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in. Meltdown expected, the wheat is growin’ thin. Engines stop running, but I have no fear. ‘Cause London is drowning, and I, I live by the river. – The Clash (lyrics from London Calling)
4) You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. – Samuel Johnson
5) Oh, I love London society! It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what society should be. – Oscar Wilde
Playwright & wit – Oscar Wilde
6) And now we’re living in the sky. I never thought I’d live so high. Just like heaven. If it didn’t look like hell. – Pulp (lyrics from Mile End)
7) The truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be. – Jane Austen
8) As long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset, I am in paradise. – The Kinks (lyrics from Waterloo Sunset)
9) I’m from London, London, London Town. You can toughen up or get thrown around. You can get 1 3 5 a ounce. Let me tell you how its going down. – Kano (lyrics from London Town)
10) I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity? – Charlotte Brontë
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