London to Dover

		Day One: London to Dover Byron and Polidori left London on xxxxxxxx, bound for Geneva. Unable to travel through France, because of …. We drove from London to Dover by way of the xxx; traffic in the other direction, from Dover to London, was bumper-to-bumper for miles and miles. This, we suspected, was traffic converging on London for the opening night of the Olympics. Against the popular will, we followed the alienated Byron out of London. We eventually left the motorway for the smaller road between xxxxxxx and Canterbury, which Byron no doubt took, and which Chaucer, an earlier poet, had memorialized in his Canterbury Tales. Byron is a pilgrim too. Byron’s journey is out into the world, from a narrow and provincial London life; on this night, the world was converging on London, with athletes from every country in the world, from Axxx to Zambia proudly and joyfully parading around the Olympic Stadium Dover: Thoughts about Churchill, the ephemeral nature of the writer's fame.