After setting the alarm clock to go off at 7am this morning - affording me an hour to have a wash, get dressed, and get to the railway station, my wonderful body of course decided that 6am was a much better time to be waking up. I’m not entirely sure how it achieves this kind of feat so reliably. I wonder if it’s linked to our cats ability to start asking for food on the stroke of 3pm, and 11pm?
Actually - scratch that - our old ginger cat - George - asks for food whenever anybody goes anywhere near the kitchen - because why else would anybody be going anywhere near his food bowl, other than to feed him?
So. I found myself up and at ‘em, showered, dressed, and on the first weekend train to London - destined to meet friends visiting from California to help give them some bearings. They wanted to do something British, so the British Museum naturally came to mind. They worried that I would want to spend the day there until I volunteered that the British Museum is perhaps my favourite place to visit in the entire city.
The only problem with the British Museum is its size - meaning that “meeting at the museum” is something of a logistical nightmare. I arrived on one side of the museum - they arrived on the opposite side. Both sides have columns. I ended up asking for a screenshot of the map from their phone - minutes later they jumped out of the crowd at me with toothy grins, and tales of their journey from America while we waited in the queue.
I don’t envy visitors to London from America. Their cities are organised into straightforward grids - blocks - where most roads are parallel or perpendicular, and clearly named at each junction. London looks much more like somebody spilled the entire contents of a saucepan filled with cooked spaghetti on the floor and then stirred it around for a while before hiding half the road signs. Thankfully GPS was our friend throughout the day. Thinking back, it’s quite shocking to think how many skills were required - taken for granted even - when visiting cities in years gone by. If you couldn’t find your way with a pocket spiral bound A-Z map book, you were pretty much lost.
We spent much of the morning wandering around the British Museum - gazing at, and reading about the collections of stuff wealthy benefactors had pilfered from the rest of the world (I’ll give credit to a good friend for “pilfered” - coined during a walk with her around the Victoria and Albert museum a year or so ago). There’s only so many Egyptian statues, Roman fertility frescos, Byzantine weapons, or dark age long boats you can look at before either your feet start to hurt, or you get hungry.
We got hungry.
After visiting the Lewis chessmen, we made our way out into the city once more. Where to take international visitors for something to eat in an international city where anything and everything is a possibility around every street corner? One of our merry band opined that fish and chips might be rather lovely. Ok. So where to get fish and chips - and sit down - and get a drink?
Wetherspoons.
We walked “a few blocks” in their parlance across the city towards Leicester Square (which required a pronunciation lesson - yes - English makes no sense - it’s “Lester”), and a little pub tucked away in the corner of the square that’s part of the mighty Wetherspoons chain - where we could hopefully get fish and chips and a drink without too much fuss - and get an authentic British pub experience into the bargain.
We lucked into a table - against the odds I must say - the pub was FULL - and put our order in through the mobile app. We somehow managed to choose a drink that was a single shot - causing much hilarity around the table - pouring it into other drinks, and ordering a further drink. Thankfully Wetherspoons are fast. After eating ourselves to a standstill, and talking about our life and careers (I always find everybody else’s stories far more interesting than my own), we set off once more - for a little sightseeing at Trafalgar Square.
The weather had other ideas.
It wasn’t so much “the heavens opened” as “somebody kicked a planet sized bucket over in the sky”. We ran for cover under a hotel awning, and while wondering how long the wind might take to blow the deluge away, lucked into the kind of entertainment you really can’t plan - an actual, live, enormous, raucous protest march by perhaps a hundred thousand people through the middle of the city.
The theme of the march wasn’t lost on my American friends - pretty much denouncing everything and anything right wing, fascist, sexist, or patriarchal. As the legions of people walked past - flanked by hundreds of police officers - I found myself looking across their ranks - trying to figure out if there were any particular skews among them. There really weren’t - it was young and old, students, professional people, families, couples, friends, all colours, all races. All demanding an end to the very thing we can all see coming in the news each day.
We decided to call it a day after the excitement of the protest march, and picked our way through the back streets to the apartment my friends had rented. I stayed for a little while - it really was a wonderful apartment - before saying my goodbyes and descending into a nearby underground station to begin the trek home.
What a wonderful day. Perhaps a reminder that each day is what we make of it - and that unless (as Mr Baggins famously said) we step outside our door, we might never discover quite where our feet will carry us off to.