The images on this page are linked to the main gallery for this section.
Wednesday 18/1/12
Packing the car, and saying goodbye to Chris and Ruth, (and paying them for the fuel we had used, as per agreement,) we drove through my Devon into Plymouth. We saw Lesley and sorted out the last of the customs paperwork. She agreed to hold our parcels in her office until the day we were due to leave the UK, so there’d be no chance of them getting home before us. We left Plymouth via the same diversion we had taken the day before, we ended up somewhere, but god knows where, thank Christ for GPS.
The drive up the M5 was nostalgic to a degree for me, but not in any way nice, I wanted to turn around and head back. Just to add to our woe, Mary the mother-in- law rang to tell us that Barnum’s heart condition had taken a major turn for the worse, and he was unlikely to be alive on our return.* We all had a damn good cry over that.
We stopped off in Reading to get the car cleaned, but the garage vacuum was out of order. We drove to the car hire return and the bastards stung us for valeting it. We took a train into London, then a tube to our hotel. It turned out to be rather fab. We walked into Bayswater for the evening, had a bite to eat at a pub, texted a bunch of people, then went back to the hotel and crashed.
*Don’t worry, put your hanky away, he’s still with us.
Thursday 19/1/12
We took the tube to the Tower of London. At the cafe there they were flogging cheese and marmite toasties, which were fantastic. We got tickets for the Tower, and joined one of the guided tours. Paul, our Beefeater Guide, (or Yeoman warder, to give him his correct title,) was very funny, and a wealth of information. The tower itself is a fantastic visit, and well worth the money. The history there is unbelievable, we stood on Anne Boleyn’s grave! There were sculptures of baboons made out of chicken wire on one wall, Christ only knows why. The Ravens of the Tower are now so used to people you can get close to them, big buggering birds though. (I was tempted to scare them off, just to see what would happen.) The “Bloody Tower” was worth the admission price on its own. We had to go and see the Crown though. Once inside the doors I saw Lee-Anne on the other side of the glass from me, and fired off a shot. This earned me a huge bollocking off the (female) beefeater. Not my fault I’d missed the “No Photography” sign, luckily though she didn’t run me through, nor make me delete it.
Outside the vaults, on guard duty, was the dorkiest looking soldier I have ever seen, he reminded me of Eccles from the goons. “The Queens safe with him about”, I giggled to myself.
Next stop? Tower Bridge. They’ve opened up the high level walkways on the bridge, and, (for a price,) you can now go up and get what must be one of the best views in London. I was more taken though by the old engines, which used to power the opening of the bridge, they reminded me of the heavy industrial components I had worked on during my apprenticeship.
We took a walk along the Thames, and stopped off in, you guessed it, another pub. I had a pint of “Cherry Porter” there, it was rather good. The pub is called the “Horniman Inn”, and so, as you can imagine, Bethy had some fun with that name. (“How far is the Horniman inn?”) That evening we went and saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie, “A Game Of Shadows” not bad at all, if a bit frantic. For supper we stopped off at an Indian restaurant, and I had the fish curry I’d been promising myself since eating fish at the Fat Duck. “Not as good as I had hoped it would be”, is the best I can say about it.
Friday 20/1/12
This would be our final shopping day, so where else to go but Harrods? But first, another marmite and cheese toasty! We took a stroll through Harrods, nothing quite seemed to grab us, it was all a little disappointing. So we went to Topshop instead, from the sublime to the ridiculous. After Topshop we decided to go hit HMV and to buy some Britcom DVDs to take home with us. We knew there was a HMV in Knightsbridge, and so strolled up and down Brompton Road looking for it, we couldn’t see it anywhere. We then looked up the address of HMV up on the i-pad. It’s in Harrods, we’d walked past it three times. We went back in, but didn’t find anything we actually wanted, so we left again. Hmmm….
Outside Harrods one of the most astonishing events of the holiday happened. We were strolling down Brompton Street when Bethy yelled; “Tia!!” which puzzled me immensely. She ran off a short way down the road, through the crowds of shoppers, and stopped at an equally astonished looking young lady. Bethy and Tia went through Primary and High School together; they were part of the same cookery team which won the Canberra cooking comp. They hadn’t seen each other since they went their different ways leaving high school to go to college, and now had bumped into each other in London. Amazing, I actually lived in the UK for 43 years, and I didn’t see a sodding person in London I knew, and here’s two Canberra girls bumping into each other by chance. They swapped tales, and we exchanged pleasantries with her folks.
Following this we decided to split. The girls went shopping;
I went to the Sherlock Holmes Museum. It was a bit packed, mainly with Asian/Oriental people, but still fun. I joined the jostling throngs and picked my way though the exhibits. I got my photo taken, wearing the obligatory Deerstalker and Calabash pipe, by a young girl dressed as “Mrs Hudson”. She was damn good, I asked some increasingly difficult questions on the canon, and she took it in good spirits, and got a fair few right. There was a gift shop, inevitably, before leaving. I had a look, nearly bought a bust of Sherlock, a deerstalker and a pipe, but chickened out. There was, I was disappointed to find, no books for sale on the canon which I didn’t already have. Three young Asian (Japanese I think,) girls seemed to be buying one each of everything in the shop. Later while shopping on Oxford street I kept running into them, there was no mistaking them, not with their wearing deerstalkers and carrying huge magnifying glasses. They give me smiles and embarrassed little giggles whenever I tugged my forelock to them.
I took a tube to Oxford street, I was on a mission on Oxford street to buy some Doc Martens shoes for work. They can cost anything up to $200 in Aus, so I knew I was on a winner by buying them there. By walking the length of Oxford street, I found five shops on selling them. I ended up back at the first shop, handing over 65 quid for a pair. Now I’ve got a fitting, I’ll be buying them at 63 quid a pair off Amazon UK.
We met back at the hotel for a cuppa. We took a London cab to the West End, and joined the throngs for “The Mousetrap.” What with Bethy being a major fan of Agatha Christie’s stuff, how could we miss it? It’s been running since 1953, older than me then, this was its 60th. year. We saw performance number 26,451, and It was fantastic! Though very professionally done, it’s now played as high farce, and as camp as a row of pink tents. It was a hoot from start to finish. If you are in London, go see it. Seriously, it’s fucking fantastic.
Afterwards we went to Jamie’s Italian Restaurant. We had to queue for a fair while, but we knocked back some wine, and people watched, and that was great. The food was great too, and our waitress was wonderful. How she kept that bubbly “nothing is ever too much trouble,” demeanour going, (it was now gone 11.00pm at night,) while working under such high stress circumstances, I’ll never know. She got a fair tip.
Saturday 21/1/12
Our last day in the UK 🙁
We packed up and cleaned our room. Or rather, we packed up and left a tidy tip for whoever would be stuck with cleaning our room. We arranged for the hotel to store our bags, and for a taxi to take us from the hotel to Heathrow at 6.30 pm. Just down the road in Bayswater, was a Greek cafe. We decide to have breakfast there. I ordered a cheese and mushroom omelette, it was great, and came with toast. So, much to Bethy’s disgust, I made it into a omelette toastie, which was even nicer. On the TV in the cafe the video for; “I’m sexy and I know it” was playing, this had me half torn between hysterical laughter and half put off my omelette toastie.
We took the tube to the V&A, mind blowing stuff, undoubtedly the greatest museum of art and design in the world. Again, one of those places you wish you’d set a day or two aside for. Some of the medieval stuff was, to my mind, the apex of religious iconography. It brought out the Goth in me. Lee-Anne was grabbing some gifts from the gift shop when an elderly lady behind her dropped a big vase, which nearly resulted in Lee-Anne following suit, or following though.
We went to see the fourth plinth with its “Ship in a bottle”; I thought it was rather jolly. (Though, embarrassingly, I was under the impression it was one of Anthony Gormly’s works.) The girls watched a street performer doing his stuff, I love these guys, but we then found we didn’t have any change to give him, I drew the line at giving him a 20, and sneaked away embarrassed.
Unfortunately our last experience of a Brit pub was also the worse. We dropped into the”Star Cross” pub just off Trafalgar Square. The girls grabbed seats, I stood at the bar. The girl came along asked me what I wanted, I named my pint, and before I could ask for the girls drinks she buggered off. Lee-Anne approached me and gave me the food orders. The girl came back with my beer, a poor pint of Fullers, and then vanished. She eventually came back, took the girls drinks orders, and then pissed off again. Eventually she returned, I managed to hold onto her long enough to put the grub order in and pay. The food took ages, and when it arrived it was mediocre at best, and cold. I went up to the bar again in the vain hope of getting a second pint.Tere was one guy in front of me, two then appeared behind me. A bargirl came up and took an order from the guy in front of me. She went off and we waited, and waited, and waited, and she didn’t come back. I looked at the guys behind me, and we all walked away.
We hit a currency exchange, and got some Euros for Moscow, and some Hong Kong dollars for… work it out yourself.
Back at the hotel, we retrieved our bags and suitcases, and begged the use of some scales off reception. By juggling, repacking, and forcing stuff into our three suitcases, we got them each under the 23 kilo limit. The guy from the hotel who was watching us was impressed and amused by our fighting over this, but mostly impressed that we managed it at all.
Our taxi arrived and we set off, with really nice Indian chap driving us in a swish Merc taxi. He was very touched by our tip. Though seeing as he went some extra miles to help with bags and got us to the very front of international departures, he deserved it.
Flight 1 London to Moscow.
Poor old Bethy had the indignity of getting body scanned and a full “touched up by a butch lesbian” frisking. Why her and not me I don’t know, at least I would have enjoyed it. The flight, yet again had no entertainment on it, apart that is from the rather attractive Russian lady who sat next to me. Her attractiveness was severely diminished when she took her shoes off. Her feet stank. Another point of interest was the alleged “meal” I got; I couldn’t even work out what it was.
Landing in Moscow was another “skid pan” test for the pilot, he also got a well deserved round of applause. When it was daylight we got to see what he had landed on, and in, which was a thick and continuous blizzard that laid a foot of snow on the ground constantly.
We had a four kilometre walk between terminals. As we were transiting and our baggage had been checked through (we hoped,) Sydney, we had no problems. However we did have a 14 hour wait ahead of us. We set up base camp, and all looked well. There are huge “duty free” shops in Moscow Airport, but these seemed mainly for show, no one seemed to be buying anything, and the assistants looked bored out of their minds. The place, as on our way out, seemed to be populated by gangsters and “Russian Brides”. Some of the women were stunningly attractive, though when you got close to them they had eyes like sharks, very scary. We found out that, even though the duty free shops sold things in Euros and Roubles, the food shops only took Roubles, of which we had none. We found a machine which changed some of the Euros we had into Rouble, I don’t think it ripped us off. Much..
The Irish Pub there was serving Russian Beers and food, so not fucking Irish at all then. I had a pint of Ruskie beer, it was ok, a sort of flat weak lager. Lee-Anne, by hiking back and fore between terminals, found a place that sold food which looked at least edible, so we ordered some “Russian” nachos. They were foul, buggered up beyond belief. How do you bugger up nachos?
The girls found a shop selling traditional Babushka dolls, and got one each, they are rather sweet. I found a shop selling the sort of T-shirt I knew would endear me to all my American chums.
Flight 2 Moscow to Hong Kong.
This was on a half decent Aeroflot 330, and so quite comfy. The fact that it was half empty and that we had two seats each made for a much more comfortable flight. We caught up on a few zzz’s. I was lucky to wake for breakfast, not because breakfast was any good, (it was yet another fruit omelette,) but because I got to watch the sunrise over Bejiing. I watched the two “Transporter” movies. I only watched the second as I couldn’t believe it could be as bad as the first. I was wrong. It was worse.
Hong Kong Airport came as a breath of fresh air, what with us being back in civilisation after Moscow! We found a place selling decent food, well in fact we found a huge food court with masses of Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian and other foods on sale, luxury! The girls had Chinese, as you do when you’re in Hong Kong, which was fantastic by all accounts. I had some strange but not unpleasant, Chinese pasty type things. The airport was so civilised that they even had sleeping benches there. We grabbed three and crashed out. Someone, me apparently, attracted a crowd by giving a display of virtuoso snoring. The one downside, and I wish I’d bloody remembered this, is you cannot take more than 100 ml of fluids onto the plane, so I couldn’t buy any duty free Scotch. If I’d have bought it in London and put it in our suitcases, it would have been fine. Not that we had any room, nor weight allowance, left in our suitcases, but still.
Flight 3 Hong Kong to Sydney.
We slept most of the flight. Then watched “The Guard” again, just as funny as the first watch, watched “Bjork”, (who I don’t think I’m alone in finding totally certifiable,) and watched a doco on Everest. I bought two litres of “Cask Strength” Laphrohaig at Sydney, duty free, but at twice what I would have paid in London.
Customs let us in without any hassle, and I got another stamp on my Aussie passport, (the “citizens” queue was shortest.)
We hired a car at the airport, a weird “hybrid” job, and drove home. Home again.
I want to come back. There’s no doubt in my mind now that I want to live in the UK again, in Devon to be precise. I want to spend time with my mates. I want a lunchtime pint or three in a Dartmoor pub, some grub there too, and then to spend an afternoon in front of a log fire at home watching Sherlock Holmes movies. I want to spend time on the moors, and by the sea. I want the weather, I want the TV, I want the history. I want MY history. I want the food and the fun, the people and the places. Oh don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything stupid like pack it all in and come back, not without a lot of planning and forethought first. Of course, Lee-Anne and Bethy are going to have to agree to come too. Lee-Anne will not leave her mum on her own in Aus, so that’s a factor. Bethy will be looking to go to Uni, so that’s another factor. At the moment we both have good jobs we enjoy, both have good incomes, and are setting ourselves up for good retirement. The exchange rate is fantastic, but may not stay that way. We have a house in Cornwall which is almost paid for. Lots and lots of different factors.
But I will be back.
Follow