One of the things I miss most during the pandemic is London. About once a month in the old days, I’d go from waking up in Paris to having morning coffee with someone in Soho. Customs were a breeze, you could work on the Eurostar and London was an incomparable one-stop shop for ideas and information. On one of my last trips, I spent the morning at a tech conference at St Pancras, then walked across the Euston Road to attend an academic seminar on rhetoric. The jackets at the second event were more frayed, but the thoughts were just as stimulating. I’d return from the typical 36-hour London visit dizzy from everything I’d heard. But now the city faces a triple whammy of Covid-19, Brexit and the rise of English-language alternatives.
我在疫情期間最想念的事情之一就是倫敦。以前，大約每個月有一天，我會早晨在巴黎醒來，上午晚些時候就在倫敦蘇豪區(Soho)與人會面喝咖啡。出入境輕而易舉，你可以在歐洲之星(Eurostar)列車上工作，而那時的倫敦是無與倫比的一站式創意和信息源泉。在我的最后幾次倫敦之行中，有一次我上午在倫敦圣潘克拉斯(St Pancras)參加一場科技會議，然后穿過尤斯頓路(Euston Road)，去參加一場關于修辭學的學術研討會。第二場會議的與會者更為不修邊幅，但他們的思想同樣令人振奮。在結束典型的36小時倫敦之行、重返巴黎時，我聽到的大量信息常常讓我頭暈。但現在，倫敦面臨著三重沖擊：新型冠狀病毒肺炎（COVID-19，即2019冠狀病毒病）疫情、英國退歐，以及其他說英語的城市崛起。