Got back last night from a six-day stay in London with wife & daughter. YuSie had rented a flat in Southwark for us via Air BnB, so we had a good base of operations. I fell ill with a bad cold halfway through our stay, which explains the complete lack of museum visits and rock gigs, but I still managed to do some fun stuff. (Left to their own devices, it turns out, the ladies will sleep late, eat big meals, shop for clothes and ride buses for fun.)
- Outsiders in London portrait photo exhibition in the crypt of St Martin in the Fields. Lovely work, interesting subjects, and I had a long interesting chat with the photographer Milan Svanderlik. The church is denominationally vanilla CoE but has apparently long had quite a radical social agenda. Homeless people were napping in the pews.
- Browsed in used-book stores, didn’t find anything I wanted.
- Bought a blue woolen engineer’s cap at Laird.
- Harrods: amazed by Egyptian escalator, flabberghasted by art department where you could buy enormous tacky statues and original Matisses. The place looks and feels like it caters mainly to the families of Arabic oil princes. Western humanities graduates will find the department store vulgar in the extreme and Harrods will not care because we are not where the money is.
- Sunshine boat ride from Westminster bridge to Greenwich, highly recommended.
- Guided walking tour of Spitalfields street art. Apparently the area has become a graffiti Meccah quite independently of the fact that it’s long been a famous curry Meccah known as Banglatown. I wonder what the inhabitants think of the street art imposed on them by elements of the majority population.
- Musical: Matilda. I’m not a big fan of the form and I wasn’t happy with the production’s class-society subtext. But Tim Minchin’s tunes are catchy and everyone put in a fine performance. Craige Els absolutely killed as the horrific school headmistress Trunchbull.
- Chinatown: I told Jrette, “This is why your Mum teaches you Chinese. There are Chinatowns all around this planet. You can walk into any one of them and be recognised on sight as someone who belongs there. Then all you have to say is ‘Dumplings please'”.
- London Eye ferris wheel: a pleasant half-hour’s bird’s eye perspective on Westminster and Southwark. I just wish it was downstream in the Roman City.
- Parks: Paddington St. Gardens, St. James’, Green Park, Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens
- Meals: noodle soup, dumplings, dim sum, Bangladeshi curries, pub lunches, fried chicken & chips, full English breakfast
