London has always been a city of incomers. In medieval and early modern times, “foreigners” were people who came from a different county, and Londoners mainly were foreigners. With its birth rate less than its death rate, the city needed, and still needs, new blood coming in all of the time to keep it going, let alone growing.

I’m one such incomer, but count my blessings in that I came into the city with professional skills, a bit of capital, and a few friends to start a support network. Many others start with far less.

This week’s Time Out continues the story of a 23-year-old Pole who arrived in London from a small, poor village, not speaking English. Wiola Andrzejewska started working in a factory without proper employment conditions, was sacked without notice, but gradually developed a network of cleaning and babysitting jobs. Going back to her home town – flying for the first time (having arrived by bus!), wearing London fashions and comparing her achievements to those of her peers who stayed at home, she realises that she has come a long way.

For others, however, London is not a place of upward mobility. That’s the case with Najwa, the central character in Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret. She arrives as an asylum-seeker, but one who, at first glance, has all of the resources necessary to make a success of her life in the city. Her family has money – rather a lot of money – which is what got them into trouble in their native Sudan in the first place, with her father held and then executed for corruption after a coup. She has at least part of a university education, excellent English from a private school education in Khartoum, and a network of helpful relatives – everything, it seems to succeed. READ MORE

Cycling into work last night (was doing one last shift at the Indy), I was stopped outside South Quay station (near Canary Wharf) by a 30-something Sri Lankan man, with a strong accident, who asked me, in tones of some shock, where he could find a church.

Now in the temple of Mammon that is Canary Wharf, that is quite a question. I sent him off to the older area of the Isle of Dogs which, looking at the map, I see was more or less the right direction. (Although whether any church would have been open would be another question.)

A church, in London, at Christmas. What an odd request. Not one a local is likely to be making.

One of those pieces of research that makes you feel slightly better about human nature: Parents who have daughters tend to become more left-wing.

There’s been a lot of fussing about gender stereotypes about this, but it seems quite obvious to me – leftwing policies in general provide more health and community services – more of a safety net. And the reality of society is that women are far more likely to need the net – if they are left as single parents, in they want the Pill for free, etc etc.

Google search terms – one of those glass half-full/half-empty tests. For the year the second and third most popular search terms were respectively Hurrican Katrina and tsunami, and a book character! – Harry Potter of course, came in at No 10. (Who’d be nasty about JK Rowling for that result?) But of course the rest is celebrity pap.

More on J.K. – this time keeping children out of hospital. Emergency hospital admissions of children went down significantly on the weekends the books were released.

My 19th-century “blogger”, Frances Williams-Wynn, is engaging in a little historical recording, copying a letter reporting, in great detail, the execution on Tower Hill of two of the lords (Kilmarnock and Balmerino) captured at Culloden in 1745, when the “Young Pretender” was defeated. This is – seriously – not something to read if you get nightmares; it is one of those pieces that make you realise the past is a foreign country.

Then again, I suppose people today do still slow down to look at car accidents.

There’s an image of the scene here. (Not gory.)This site records that “a pub called ‘THREE LORDS’ was built at 27 Church Street, Minories, London E. The Inn sign showed them with the executioner’s axe and the block.”

You know that business about always backing up your work? Well if it needs reinforcing, here’s a tale of a woman whose only copy of her master’s thesis was stolen. But she couldn’t face re-writing it, so she went bin-diving.

Then, an obit to die for.

Peter Brunt, who has died aged 88, was Camden professor of ancient (Roman) history and fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, … his most important contribution was his innate sympathy with the Roman proletariat demonstrated in his 700-page book, Italian Manpower 225 BC-AD14 (1971). It may be unreadable – it ends as it begins, with a table of figures – but it includes everything you need to know about the Roman proletariat, whose suffering in the creation of the Roman empire is enthusiastically quantified …By the end of the process we are so exhausted that we do not notice that there is no conclusion…

(Hat-tip to The Little Professor.)

Everyone is posting Christmas stories, and while the following isn’t exactly that, it seems appropriate to the season. It might also be given as a cautionary tale to those women who think it is a good idea to throw their fate and future into the arms of a man.

Sister Anne
from The Spell of London, by HV Morton (first published 1926)

In Bloomsbury there is a captive lady. I have seen her. She sits at a window in a tall, grim house, too near the roof to be the owner and not quite high enough to be the maid. She reads a lot, I believe, and thinks more than she reads, for whenever I see her she has just looked up from a book, and is gazing down into the rather too consciously respectable square with eyes which may, or may not, see the life that goes on there.

She reminds me of Sister Anne of the fairy-tale turret; only she is a much older Sister Anne, with a something about her that tells me how long ago she renounced all hope of seeing a horseman come spurring down the road to rescue. She is the lady of the bed-sitting-room … ‘a gentlewoman in reduced circumstances.’

‘Bed-sitting-room, with use of bath.’ There are thousands in London, in every great city, and in many of them a woman is sitting ‘like Patience on a monument smiling at Grief. It is good for us now and then to know hard times, but it is tragic to fall into that hopeless category among those who ‘have known better times’. Sister Anne has known better times, and that, I think, is what she is always thinking about when she forgets to read and sits looking down into that too self-consciously respectable square.

‘I remember when my dear Henry was alive,’ she always says, if you listen long enough; for that is the burden of all her thought. Dear Henry, however, died and left her stranded. He either crashed on the Stock Exchange, or she discovered that everything was mortgaged, and she turned to face life alone—imagine beginning life alone at fifty—in a bed-sitting-room ‘with use of bath’!

There is little that Sister Anne can do. What can a woman who has been nursed all her life learn at fifty? Sometimes, I think, I have seen her steal into Bond Street shops trying to look like a customer. She unwraps a brown paper parcel and takes out embroidery; for her mother fortunately taught her to be ‘clever with her needle’. They give her a few shillings and some more work. Out into Bond Street she goes, still trying to look like a customer, for, you see, she has the pride of the poor and the shame of ‘having known better days’.

‘Poor thing!’ they say in the shop. Or perhaps: ‘Do you remember when Mrs. X used to drive up in her carriage?’

*****

In the bed-sitting-room in Bloomsbury are those few things which she managed to snatch from the creditors and the auctioneer; a silver frame, that looks so alien in a tawdry room, from which dear Henry gazes out with the blithe and dashing expression so characteristic of his more prosperous day. A chair or two; a carriage clock: useless knick-knacks which look as queer in that nakedness as the strange things the sea leaves when the tide goes out. . . . Sometimes there is a photograph of a child who, had he lived, would be a man now, capable of picking his mother up from the humiliation of a bed-sitting-room.

In the winter, when coal is dear. Sister Anne leaves her turret and spends the day in the rest rooms of the big Oxford Street stores, writing innumerable letters, reading magazines, and watching other women; remembering things about the other half of her life.

Or she haunts, like a ghost, those parts of good hotels where there is no danger of being handed a bill. The porters and the clerks know that she has no appointment in the lounge or the writing-room. Sister Anne just sits there because it is warm,, and because it is what she was once accustomed to do before dear Henry escaped from this life.

London is cruel to the lonely. As long as you have a pound note to squander, you find a friend. When the last penny goes, and you are too proud to exhibit your poverty, Solitude and Memory perch on your window-sill like birds of ill omen; and you grow inward and talk to them; and people think you are talking to yourself.

So whenever I walk through Bloomsbury and see Sister Anne’s refined white face at a window, I wonder why some of the altruism that runs waste does not trickle in her direction.

How much happiness a Bed-Sitting-Roomers Club would bring into the world I am not prepared to say, knowing a little of human nature. But it always seems to me that if Sister Anne could, without any loss to her dignity or any hint of that kind of charity which thrives on the enjoyment of pitying be drawn away from that lonely window she might learn how to smile again—as she did before poor, dear Henry, with characteristic dash, flung his widow at Fate.

*****

The fairytale Sister Anne reference appears to be to the story of Bluebeard.