Walking around London
So, Saturday was Jon’s stag night. We were all due to meet up in All Bar One in Chicheley Street, near to the London Eye, at 3.30. I got to Waterloo, the nearest tube station, at 2.30pm. Deliberately. I don’t often go to London. When I do, it tends to be for meetings and things like that, so I’m caught for time. This time, I arrived an hour early so I could have a little wander around the South Bank, the bit of London with the Houses of Parliament and the world’s biggest Ferris wheel. I care not that the site there reckons that it is not technically a Ferris wheel. Perhaps we should just call it the London Folly and be done with it, but I fear that the Millennium Tent may hold that distinction unto eternity. Anyway, it was an impressively sunny day, so I got to walk around with my hands in my pockets and admire the area. It’s very clean. Pretty, too. It must be difficult to think of squalor and riots when you walk out of your place of work into this area of calm and niceness. I walked into the pub and a rather harried barmaid asked, in a rush of words, what I wanted to drink, apologising for keeping me waiting. “It’s Saturday,” I said. “It’s the weekend. I’m in no rush.” Sadly, she didn’t hear me the first time, but repeating it got me a smile.
I’m getting worried about you: first you remark that £2.50 is quite reasonable for a pint of beer, you compliment a Londoner on how friendly they are, and describe a part of London as pretty and clean. You don’t have a job lined up there do you? The Houses of Parliament are of course on the north bank of the Thames. They’d never put anything so important south of the river, except Kent.
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Nope, I am not moving to London. I tend to think of our glorious capital city as a pile of sweaty bodies, grime, and ridiculously overpriced things, and so when I find somewhere that isn’t — I mean, two fifty for a pint isn’t cheap but it’s pretty reasonable, even outside London — I am pleasantly surprised. Shocked, even.
I confess that I didn’t actually walk as far as Westminster Bridge, and thus didn’t gaze upon the Houses of Parliament. This is partially because I’ve seen them before, partially because I can’t view them without wishing that Francis Tresham had died in childhood, and partially because I didn’t want to look like a tourist…
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