“Nowości Illustrowane”

Timezone: UTC.

Southampton, the day of boarding the transoceanic ship and therefore my last day in the UK. But first, a service at St Michael's, a church founded by the Normans shortly after their conquest of England. A seemingly small congregation, and very welcoming, indeed. Some pleasant chatter with two (retired) ministers, mainly about what the Anglican Church really is. It was not a question we could settle in the half an hour we had available, unfortunately.

I then walked up to the remnants of Holy Rood, a church with seemingly Saxon roots, once a temple used by crusaders heading for the Holy Land, destroyed by German bombers in 1940. I nourished the part of me that longs for ruins.

The ship which for me will constitute “the only way to cross” the Atlantic, seeing I could not fly, is quite spectacular, but I need some time before I can comment any further.

When the morning – the morning – came, and we met at breakfast, it was curious to see how eager we all were to prevent a moment’s pause in the conversation, and how astoundingly gay everybody was: the forced spirits of each member of the little party having as much likeness to his natural mirth, as hot-house peas at five guineas the quart, resemble in flavour the growth of the dews, and air, and rain of Heaven. But as one o’clock, the hour for going aboard, drew near, this volubility dwindled away by little and little, despite the most persevering efforts to the contrary, until at last, the matter being now quite desperate, we threw off all disguise; openly speculated upon where we should be this time to-morrow, this time next day, and so forth; and entrusted a vast number of messages to those who intended returning to town that night, which were to be delivered at home and elsewhere without fail, within the very shortest possible space of time after the arrival of the railway train at Euston Square. And commissions and remembrances do so crowd upon one at such a time, that we were still busied with this employment when we found ourselves fused, as it were, into a dense conglomeration of passengers and passengers’ friends and passengers’ luggage, all jumbled together on the deck of a small steamboat, and panting and snorting off to the packet, which had worked out of dock yesterday afternoon and was now lying at her moorings in the river.
And there she is! all eyes are turned to where she lies, dimly discernible through the gathering fog of the early winter afternoon; every finger is pointed in the same direction; and murmurs of interest and admiration—as ‘How beautiful she looks!’ ‘How trim she is!’—are heard on every side.
Charles Dickens, “American Notes for General Circulation“