Leonardo da Vinci original picture of the last supper paintingGeorge Frederick Watts Pablo and Francesca paintingFrancisco de Goya The Quail Shoot painting
looked in his direction, dreaming of being the one to possess it and so, in a sense, become it, as when in the footsteps the child who touches the one who's _it_ ("on it", today's young Londoners would say) takes over that cherished identity; as, also, in the myth of the Golden Bough. London, its conglomerate nature mirroring his own, its reticence also his; its gargoyles, the ghostly footfalls in its streets of Roman feet, the honks of its departing migrant geese. Its hospitality -- yes! -- in spite of immigration laws, and his own recent experience, he still insisted on the truth of that: an imperfect welcome, true, one capable of bigotry, but a real thing, nonetheless, as was attested by the existence in a South London borough of a pub in which no language but Ukrainian could be heard, and by the annual reunion, in Wembley, a stone's throw from the great stadium surrounded by imperial echoes -- Empire Way, the Empire Pool -- of more than a hundred delegates, all tracing their ancestry back to a single, small Goan village. -- "We Londoners can be proud of our hospitality," he'd told Pamela, and she, giggling
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