Reasons To Be Thankful - 26/01/2014

Source: MJASmith

It's all too easy to find things to complain about in your life - endless automated menu systems on company phone lines, getting cut up at a roundabout, not getting enough sleep, you know the drill.

It occurred to me recently that the people who have the most positive impact on your life also tend to be the most optimistic, the ones who seem resolutely upbeat and untrammeled by any small inconvenience. So, in an effort to approach things more positively, I decided to look back on the last week and, if I could find five things to feel truly thankful for, I figured I'd be on the right track. When I put my mind to it, it wasn't that hard.

Migraleve and Nurofen

On Wednesday morning I woke up with a dull headache. By the time I'd got to work and fired up my PC it was evident to me that it had become a migraine, in all its nauseating glory. I don't suffer with migraines very often but a couple of years ago I woke up on a Saturday morning with one whilst on a weekend away with M. and the girls in London and I wound up buying some Migraleve from Boots in Canary Wharf which cleared it away really quickly. (Pleased though I was with that, I was shocked at the note on the packet advising that, because of its codeine content, more than three days of use could cause addiction).

Since that day I've always carried that packet of Migraleve in my work bag (as a preemptive measure against a potential migraine, not because I'm now addicted to painkillers). It worked on Wednesday, or well enough to get me through a meeting with my boss and the various conference calls I sat through that day. The well-it-would-be-a-shame-to-leave-a-trickle-in-the-bottle glass of wine that M. poured for me that evening may have been a mistake, or maybe it just took longer to get over the migraine, but I woke up on Thursday with another headache, but a couple of Nurofen took care of that.

I didn't plan to open this post by being thankful for over-the-counter drugs, but nevertheless they really helped this week.

Brownies

My eldest daughter started Brownies last year, and each Thursday after dutifully completing her homework at school she goes off to our local community centre for a couple of hours. She loves it, and just completed the work for her first badge - the Booklovers badge, appropriately enough, given that at seven she has a reading age well beyond that and goes through novels like they're going out of fashion.

I pick her up from Brownies every week. It's only a two minute drive from the community centre to our house, but it's actually the only two minutes I get to spend alone with her each week. It's always a highlight, especially as she comes out of the hall positively bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm (for context, she's normally very calm and reserved). It's become one of my most cherished moments of the week, even if it means that she doesn't settle down to bed for ages because she's so excited about the fun stuff she's been up to with the group. This week she emerged carrying a shoebox which she'd decorated with a rudimentary decoupage from magazines, wrapping paper, old calendars and so on. I don't think I've ever seen her get as excited about anything else in her life, giving me some small ray of hope that she might always enjoy the simpler things in life.

Beigel Bake, Brick Lane

Every Friday lunchtime, two colleagues of mine and I leave the modern environs of the City and head for the infinitely more interesting Brick Lane, the sole reason for this excursion being to buy bagels from one of the two shops in the stretch of Brick Lane just north of where the old Truman Brewery used to be.

More often than not, I'm just picking up bagels for the following day's lunch, though quite when I got into this habit I don't know. It would be all too easy to pick up a packet of bagels from the supermarket close to home, but those bagels are poor synthetic cousins to the small, chewy rolls that you can only really get from a proper Jewish outlet. Plus at 25p per bagel, I can't think of many other lunches that come cheaper than that.

My colleagues and I started going to the first bagel shop you come to as you walk up Brick Lane from the old brewery. At some point we switched allegiance to Beigel Bake a couple of doors up, where the service is better and the staff friendlier. On our recent excursion I bought a slice of baked cheesecake, which, in all its firm, crumbly glory, was just about the best cheesecake I've ever had. A snip at just 70p. Most Fridays my friend Dan follows up his salt beef bagel with a coffee from Brick Lane Coffee next door, a funky place with a predilection for Lego, Star Wars and risqué posters and mugs with deceptive slogans that you'd never give to your parents if they popped in for a cuppa.

(In the picture above you can see my friend Anthony emerging from the shop; I like to think the smile on his face shows how much we enjoy visiting this place.)

Saturday Mornings

Time was, back when the girls were younger, when I would spend Saturday mornings in a terrible mood. For a while we attributed this to a pair of Mr. Grumpy socks that always seemed to be the next pair at the top of my sock drawer whenever Saturday came around; we now realise that this was a mere coincidence. None of us believe in magic, character-changing socks these days.

The truth was that I just didn't know what I was doing, or had no confidence in my abilities as a father, or both. M. would head off to the gym early Saturday morning, something which I never begrudged her doing after a week of looking after the kids while I went to work, but the mood that prevailed before she left the house may well have been construed as such.

Nowadays things are better. M. still goes to the gym all morning but I'm much more relaxed. This is probably because the girls have grown up a bit and my duties extend to simply putting out bowls for the cereal that they pour themselves or cleaning their teeth before we leave the house. I'm probably no more confident than I was when they were younger (I still can't tie their hair up in ponytails, for example), but things have definitely become easier. I'm still prone to bouts of grumpiness but I'm much more self-aware these days: it's true that you get out what you put in, and you can guarantee that if I'm in a mood then all I'm going to get back is two very grumpy little girls, and grumpy girls are indeed a force to be reckoned with.

My eldest daughter goes to a drama class for most of Saturday morning, leaving me to spend three hours with my youngest daughter. Those three hours have become among the most cherished of the week, something I couldn't have imagined earlier in her life. Our eldest is a daddy's girl through and through but it's fair to say that my relationship with our youngest was always a bit more strained, and I've never had as close a relationship as M. enjoys with her. Perhaps through me being more relaxed, or her growing up a bit more, Saturday mornings have given us a chance to enjoy each other's company and bond a lot more. It's only taken almost six years.

Most Saturday mornings we'll find ourselves running errands, either to a supermarket in Milton Keynes or taking a walk to our local high street shops in Woburn Sands to visit the tiny library we are fortunate enough to have in this small town of ours. We talk about whatever takes our fancy, play I spy, look out for cats, interesting buildings or just make small talk about school, work or sundry other things according to our moods. Just lately I've made a commitment to her that once we've done our chores we'll spend some time doing some sort of craft activity. A couple of weekends ago it was decorating a paper lantern she got for Christmas, while this weekend it was decorating a shoebox just like her sister had done enthusiastically at Brownies earlier in the week.

I've never been a big fan of getting messy, and for a long time we've been happy to outsource that sort of activity to their school teachers but I guess I've reached a point where I think it's fun, and certainly worth it for the happiness it brings my youngest little girl.

For the record, I still have the Mr. Grumpy socks, but they appear to have lost whatever potency they may once have had.

Breaking Bad

I am passionately averse to anything that's hyped. I don't know when this started, but over the years it's just developed into a sort of mantra; I don't mind 'cult' films or books, but such things often attain that cult status because they were roundly ignored when they were first made and achieve plaudits by slowly working their way into people's hearts. Hyped things don't do that; they have an impudent swagger, get five star ratings as soon as some reviewer has watched the opening credits, and get critics sufficiently hot under the collar to deploy billboard-worthy words with a fervent enthusiasm that all seems a bit daft. (I realise that in saying this I'm being somewhat ironic, given that my music reviews are published each month by Clash and I will confess to having deliberately worked up at least one sentence in a review with the sole purpose of seeing it quoted in an advert).

So it was with Breaking Bad: everyone I knew was gushing about it, and so I wanted to avoid it with similar enthusiasm. And then a colleague let me borrow the boxset of the first three series and, despite some initial reticence M. and I were both hooked (aided, in M.'s case by Aaron Paul, the latest in a lengthening line of men she confesses to having a crush on). Sufficiently hooked, I would say, to have found ourselves approaching the end of the third series with an addict's sense of desperation: we'd watched two or three episodes per night for going on three weeks and with series four not in our possession, we had a need for another fix but no real way of knowing where the next hit was going to come from.

I found myself at a kids party with my youngest daughter this past weekend where I spent a comfortable hour extolling the virtues of the show to another dad, who, in wearing a very cool Heisenberg t-shirt, had marked himself out rather prominently as something of a fan.

'Series four is the best,' he mused, perhaps sensing my desperation to get my hands on those episodes. I briefly wondered if he would exchange those episodes for one of my kidneys.

Perhaps I've been wrong about hype all along. I was wrong about The Wire and Girls and many other things. But then I think back to the hours wasted watching Kill Bill, some Oscar-winning ensemble cast film that might have gathered all sorts of risible adjectives or Comedy Central garbage like The Millers or Mike And Molly and reckon I'm not quite ready to slavishly follow the herd just yet.

Celebrity Spotting

My colleagues and I like to play a game of trying to spot famous celebrities, generally whilst travelling. My friend Dan likes to bend the rules slightly by calling out the names of famous actors he's mingled with after theatre productions in the West End, but, whilst there's no denying that spotting Dame Helen Mirren has major kudos, if you spend time with thesps in theatre land, you're quite likely to bump into a major board-treader.

Mike and I have a more purist view of the game: they have to be people spotted in an airport, on a plane or in an airport lounge. Mike's most recent spot was Sarah Ferguson. Mine was Noel Gallagher. My previous spots have included Richard Bacon and Sue Perkins. It's a mildly diverting game.

Outside of travelling, I have seen two major Hollywood celebrities on the street. The first was Kiefer Sutherland, who I saw at approximately 8.30 in the morning wandering through a deserted Covent Garden, dressed in a blue suit, wearing sunglasses, smoking a cigarette and bearing a facial expression that said 'Yes, it's me, and yes, I am way too cool for school.' My family and I had come down to London after our flight to Portugal had been cancelled thanks to that Icelandic ash cloud back in 2010; he, I would later discover from reading a newspaper, was stranded in London for the same reason, only whereas we had spent a civilised night in our Canary Wharf hotel, he had spent the night partying, and evidently whilst we were on our way out to breakfast, he was on his way home.

My personal favourite spot, and the one that prompted this piece, was last May while we were on holiday in New York. This was our second family trip to the Big Apple, and the third for M. and I. Whenever we head to NY I think we're going to be bumping into celebrities on every block, but of course we never do. They hide, evidently.

So it was our first night in Manhattan and we'd gone for a major wander to re-orient ourselves. Our aim was to find a branch of Whole Foods somewhere downtown, but we ended up getting thoroughly lost, and instead found ourselves in Greenwich Village - arguably the most confusing part of the island thanks to its London-esque jumble of streets - and popped into a D'Agostino on Greenwich Street for over-priced supplies.

When we came out, sixty-odd dollars lighter, it had started to drizzle. On the street we saw a big man riding a bike. He looked reasonably familiar, but it was only when he got off the bike and chained it to a lamppost that I realised it was Philip Seymour Hoffman. I think I probably whispered 'Look, that's you-know-who!' to M. in that vaguely star-struck too-loud voice you inevitably use on such occasions, which unintentionally caught his attention.

In response, he just nodded sagely, raised a hand and offered a small, slightly embarrassed smile. Later we found out he lived in that part of town and that he'd just come out of a spell in rehab. In the celeb spotting stakes, an Oscar winner riding a bike after time kicking drugs was up there with the best.

Less than a year later he was dead from a suspected overdose.

Rest in peace PSH.

In The Early Morning Security Queue, Heathrow

Source: Wikipedia

It's just after five in the morning and I'm fourth in line at the fast track security search queue at Heathrow's Terminal 5. Immediately in front of me is a young girl who is dressed as if she's about to head off to a jungle somewhere - sturdy boots, practical clothes, heavily-laden rucksack. In front of her are two large African-American women with big handbags and scarves and hats.

The security guard is a brusque, efficient, unsmiling Australian woman who has a facial expression that suggests she resents having to work at this early hour. The trays on the conveyor passing through the x-ray are backed up and nothing is moving.

The first African-American lady puts her items into one of the large grey plastic trays when a gap in the conveyor appears and wanders off through the metal detector, swiftly followed by the second woman, only the second woman is wearing what might be boots, but as they're tucked beneath her jeans, it's hard to tell. The Australian guard calls the woman back and asks her, not unpolitely but certainly firmly, if she's wearing boots. The woman grunts something that I can't make out and hands her boots to the guard and then huffs off toward the gate again.

The Australian guard could easily have let it pass, but chooses not to, and says something officious back about rules and regulations that clearly winds the woman up further. She turns back, makes a complaint about why she should even have to take her boots off anyway, just at the point where the guard is lowering the boots into one of the woman's two trays, this one holding her coat. Still complaining, the woman grabs the boots and thrusts them into her other tray, the one containing her ridiculously over-sized handbag, presumably affronted at the way the guard could have dirtied her coat by placing her boots there.

It's clear that the Australian guard is not going to take this lying down and offers a perfunctory retort, bereft of any hesitation or pause for breath.

'Madam if you object to having to take your boots off I suggest you avoid travelling in the future.' It's a perfectly barbed response, but it's evident that this response has no real purpose whatsoever; it's just designed to antagonise, and that's exactly what it does.

The woman responds with some low growl or other and the Australian looks momentarily shocked. I honestly thought she was going to get a burly security guard over and have the woman denied the opportunity to fly, but instead she just responds with a defensive 'My God, it's not even six in the morning and you want to argue,' as if there is an official start time from which one is allowed to enter into disagreements with one another. The woman waddles off through the metal detector and the young girl in front of me mutely and compliantly removes her sturdy boots and places then in a tray.

The Australian guard is evidently not finished with the African-American woman and what she does next is both passive-aggressive and final proof that she absolutely maintains the upper hand in this whole business. I watch as she calmly wanders down to the guards at the other end of the belt, whispers something out of the side of her mouth to one of them and goes back to her station. I may have imagined a small smile on her face as she did so.

Soon, I'm on the other side of the metal detector, waiting for my own tray to descend down the rollers toward me. The jungle trek girl and the two African-American are next to me, and the two women are evidently moaning about what just happened. The first woman's tray emerges from the x-ray and teeters slowly down the rollers toward where she's waiting. When the other woman's bag emerges, it pauses momentarily before being mechanically shoved over onto a separate set of rollers, meaning that the bag is now only accessible to the security guards at this end of the belt.

'Why is my bag that side?' pleads the woman.

The guard responds blankly that it needs to be opened and the contents completely emptied and checked thoroughly. He glances back at the Australian guard who is beaming innocently. It's clear that the woman poses no major terrorist threat and that they'll find nothing remotely unacceptable in her bag, but in thinking she's got the upper hand when dealing with the authorities, she's misplaced where she sits in the pecking order of things, and now she's paying the price.

I wander off to the lounge to get some breakfast, wondering if they'll cart her off to a room nearby for a more comprehensive search for no other reason than to teach her a lesson. I wonder if she'll think twice before answering back next time.

Another London Saturday - 16 February 2013

Source: MJA Smith

After a slow start to the day, we jumped in our car and drove down the M1 to Stanmore to pick up the Jubilee Line - one of the few lines actually running that day - to head into London. Mrs S's parents always used to use Stanmore and the Jubilee Line to get into London when she was a little girl, and so it's become our chosen means of getting into the West End on a weekend as well. Considering that most days of the week I catch a train from Bletchley into London, driving on the motorway and then using the Jubilee Line seems a bit odd to me, but equally Mrs S and I have had so many weekends, admittedly before the kids were born, where the trains from Euston were replaced by buses that seemed to take an interminable time to get home that driving and then taking the Jubilee Line doesn't seem that ridiculous after all.

As is more or less customary, we took the train to Baker Street. Daughter 1 (six) spent the entire journey reading a book from our local village library and Daughter 2 (four) sat next to me chatting away, fidgeting, trying to figure out where we were on the Tube map and generally getting excited about a trip to London. A few years ago she was intimidated by the Tube, hoping that every stop we reached was the one we'd be getting off at and getting a little freaked out after Finchley Road when the line goes underground, but perseverance and conditioning has paid off and she's fine now. Daughter 1 associates the Tube with reading, having read her first book all by herself on the way back one Sunday when she was four. The book was The Tiger Who Came To Tea, bought at Daunt on Marylebone High Street. A couple of years later and she's now reading lengthy classic novels. I'm both proud and more than a little horrified by her reading age.

At Baker Street we dodged the hordes of people queuing and making a nuisance of themselves on the pavement outside Madame Tussaud, not for the first time wondering what the appeal of that place is. Over Baker Street and through the parish church onto Marylebone High Street, stopping briefly at a market stall in the churchyard so that the girls could sample some very reasonably-priced macaroons that a pleasant young lady offered them. I regret not rewarding her generosity with a purchase but I'm sure she'll be there again.

We've been coming to Marylebone now for a few years. If I could live anywhere in London it would probably be here, and I really like the fact that on any given day you hear a curious number of American voices. It's like there's a book somewhere in the States that says any hedge fund manager, executive or well-heeled director should make a beeline for property in Marylebone if they find themselves needing to transfer to London for an extended period. People say Marylebone is like a village, and I guess it is in the sense that there's a distinct feeling of community that feels totally different from, say, vapid, commercial, gaudy Oxford Street only a few hundred metres away; perhaps it's a village in the same way that New York's West and East villages are villages, i.e. really expensive, still trendy but a long way from the small communities they once were.

In these more straitened times, we eschewed our normal browsing in the Conran Shop but Mrs S couldn't avoid nipping into Cath Kidston to top-up on mugs, presents and other stuff that I turned a blind eye to. While she was nattering to a member of staff, the girls and I played a game with the wall of loose buttons that they have downstairs, each of us asking to find a particular button based on briefly mentioning its attributes in vague details. An example: 'Who can find me a blue button shaped like a triangle?' Seeing buttons arranged like that reminds me of trips to a haberdashers called Fred Winter in Stratford-upon-Avon with my mother as a child; trips to town with her invariably involved a trip to either that shop or another one to buy wool, buttons or a pattern. The girls and I have played this game once before, and I think that it's one of the few things that could well hold their attention for a whole day.

From Cath Kidston, down Marylebone High Street to Daunt. Daunt is an independent bookshop that I've written about before. Its principal attraction today was the tiny wooden stools at the back of the ground floor's childrens' department, the girls both pulling books from the shelves, grabbing a stool and reading (in Daughter 1's case, quickly and silently; in Daughter 2's case, quickly, loudly and whilst making up her own story in spite of being able to read a lot of the words herself). Daughter 2 seemed to struggle with the concept that because we'd entered a bookshop from which we'd bought books previously that didn't mean that we would automatically be buying her a book today. The classic 'It's a week until your birthday,' line did little to assuage her, and so we left quicker than we wanted, one very disappointed little girl in tow. I briefly gazed in the window of Oxfam, knowing that at the back of the store is a really good selection of vinyl records; it took all my reserves of willpower not to fly in there to thumb through the racks.

From Marylebone High Street to Charing Cross Road, past swanky houses, offices, embassies and the various medical and therapy practices clustered around Harley Street, Daughter 2 and I counting cabs and disagreeing over whether the game should include the new Mercedes taxis or just classic cabs, catching glimpses of the BT tower and reminiscing about the time we saw James McAvoy filming a scene for a film that turned out to be Danny Boyle's Trance one Saturday afternoon on Harley Street. On Great Portland Street we looked in the window of Villandry, making a commitment that next time we spent the day in London we should either visit there, or somewhere else, and avoid the habitual trip to Giraffe. Passing through Soho Square we remembered walking through there in the summer, people sunbathing and relaxing next to a mix of old and modern statues that Daughter 2 found hilarious. On this particular Saturday someone chanting a very half-hearted 'Hare Krishna' made Daughter 1 furrow her brow and whisper 'What's she doing?' with teenage-esque disdain.

We reached Charing Cross Road via Manette Street, passing the unusual sight of a golden forearm jutting from above a doorway next to Foyles's side entrance which we all found funny to see, though the naturally inquisitive part of me wanted to know exactly what it was doing there (turns out it's the entrance to Goldbeaters' Hall). Mrs S and Daughter 1 being way too early for the matinee of Midnight Tango we'd arranged the day in London around, we ducked into Foyles and let the kids read books while we passed the time. Never mind that they'd done exactly the same in Daunt no more than two hours before; they approached it with precisely the same amount of zeal, and not for the first time did I hope that their enthusiasm for reading will continue beyond childhood.

Doors at the Phoenix Theatre, a beautiful but cosy theatre whose main entrance is tucked away on Flitcroft Street, opened at around 2.30, and so Daughter 2 and I said our farewells and set off for own afternoon of excitement in the capital. The idea had been to take her to the Transport Museum in Covent Garden, but having finally got into the main piazza after battling through the throng of tourists trying to squeeze into the Tube station on the corner of Long Acre - despite ample signs recommending walking the short distance to Leicester Square instead - and the crowds of people watching the gold-painted human statues, we discovered a queue outside the Transport Museum that easily consisted of fifty people. I'd wanted to take Daughter 2 to see the exhibition of posters marking the 150th anniversary of the Underground that had opened the day before, but I hadn't reckoned on its popularity being so great, and neither had I considered that it was the first day of half term for a lot of kids. Though I was a little deflated, Daughter 2 managed to maintain a cheery disposition in spite of the disappointment and showed that kids actually don't need that much entertainment after all when she said 'All I really want to do is go for a muffin at Starbucks, daddy.'

At The Strand we passed a Starbucks but it was too busy, queues up to the door and a solitary seat outside that was hardly appealing on a cold day, and before we knew it we were crossing Waterloo Bridge, the idea having formed in my mind to take her to the South Bank where cafes are generally less busy, where there's a bit more breathing space and where the possibility of a free visit to Tate Modern would make up for the museum trip I'd promised her.

The South Bank generally has a vibrancy and buzz that means it's more or less impossible not to see something interesting, quirky or downright daft as you walk along. That Saturday afternoon it took the form of a beach on the foreshore of the Thames, complete with a sand-sculpted sofa upon which two guys were playing guitars, bongos and singing for coins - and a guy in formal tails 'playing' a tuba to a CD while blowing flames out of the top of his instrument. Daughter 2 found that alternately hilarious and a little freaky. We stopped for the muffin she wanted at the Oxo Tower branch of EAT, covered her little face in plenty of chocolate while I sipped a latte and finally offered me the half she decided she couldn't quite manage.

Heading back onto the South Bank we got caught in the inevitable throng of people bottlenecking their way through the tunnel at Blackfriars Bridge. Blackfriars has been undergoing a major overhaul since I don't know when and now represents a fusion of the very old - the infrastructure of the bridge itself - and the modern, with the entire span of the railway bridge covered in fan-like solar panels, simultaneously providing Blackfriars station with a decent amount of its annual power requirement as well as providing passengers on the platform with some relief from the elements. In the tunnel, Daughter 2 danced to a South American band that was jamming out songs on really basic equipment, raising a smile from the drummer. Out of the main tunnel, she was fascinated by the wooden slats under the bridge and also the remains of an older bridge just to the west of the present Blackfriars Bridge. It's moments like this when constantly pointing out things that you personally find interesting feels suddenly worthwhile.

Source: MJA Smith

At Tate Modern I was hoping to see Kraftwerk's equipment being tidied away following their concerts earlier in the week. I have a habit of arriving at modern art museums just after they've played. I visited MoMA in New York immediately after they'd played in 2012, and the crew were still packing their set away when we were in the museum. Alas, this time there was no trace whatsoever in the Turbine Hall. We headed up to the Surrealistic exhibit up on the second floor and Daughter 2 spent the time seeing what was in the various pictures as well as doing a really impressive job of explaining what it reminded her of, what the shapes and obscure blurrings sort of looked like and in some cases how it made her feel. I was really impressed with her for being able to do this just before she turned five. We only looked at that exhibit while we were there, and we careered round that at pretty high speed, but it was brief time well spent.

Despite Daughter 2's protestations that she was tired, we had no real choice but to walk back to Charing Cross Road. On the Millennium Bridge we bumped into around thirty congenial people dressed, for no discernible reason, in animal costumes and on the north side, on the approach to St. Paul's, encountered a headless street performer. Walking along Queen Victoria Street we passed the ostentatious UK headquarters of the Church Of Scientology and the new Blackfriars station. 'Can we get a train from there?' pleaded Daughter 2 wearily, but even if we'd wanted to there were no Tubes running on the lines passing through the station anyway. As we approached Blackfriars, we were greeted with the strange vision of a mainline train emerging from behind the Bank of New York Mellon offices, having just come out of the adjacent City Thameslink concourse, ascending the bridge to stop at Blackfriars. It seemed totally out of place somehow, and ultra futuristic despite being old rolling stock on a far older bridge.

We passed the expansive former estate of the Knights Templars, now home to a complex of legal practices. The gardens at Temple are beautiful, but also more or less inaccessible unless you're privileged to have access to them. Perhaps I'm a conspiracy theorist after all, or perhaps I've started to believe the hokum in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, but I did find myself shuddering as I walked past both Temple and the Church of Scientology slightly earlier. Fortunately, walking a little further on any sense of weirdness in the air evaporated as we encountered the crowds of fashionistas queuing at the Valentino exhibition; it seemed to restore a sense of superficiality back to proceedings. In contrast to the well-dressed crowd, we were passed by a pack of boys pulling tricks on skateboards. 'I used to have a skateboard,' I told Daughter 2, now being carried for a few hundred metres. 'Could you do that?' she asked, as one of the kids flicked his board up, twirled it in midair and landed on it perfectly. I sighed, thinking back to my heavy, cheap deck bought from a toyshop in Westcliff-on-Sea in my youth. 'No,' I muttered. I could barely ride the thing, let alone do tricks.

Eventually we got back to the Phoenix Theatre a few minutes before turning-out time. As we approached the main entrance to the theatre, we took a look at the progress being made on the Phoenix Garden. The Garden, an old car park that was saved from being converted into luxury apartments, is a charity space run by volunteers. It's one of those places tucked away that retains a secretive, hidden quality in spite of being surrounded on all sides by busy roads. The four of us followed a guidebook to the garden once when looking for things to do in London with children, and at the time the space was populated by a mere smattering of people chilling out among the carefully maintained but overgrown plantings. If it wasn't for the vigilance of the volunteer workers and the absolute zero tolerance policy toward drugs and alcohol in the park, you'd think it would be a key destination for junkies and drunks. The day we were there a couple of years ago, there was one trampy-looking guy snoring contentedly under a bush, but otherwise it was a picture of conviviality and tranquility, a couple of indie guys strumming an acoustic guitar aimlessly at the back of the park next to some inoffensive graffiti, and the most dangerous things that we saw that day were a lazy pollen-covered bee, a tiny fieldmouse and a few ladybirds. The park was just a muddy mess when Daughter 2 and I poked our noses through the bars that Saturday, but I'm sure it will be returned to its bohemian splendour in no time at all.

Emerging from the theatre while Daughter 2 were topping up our energy levels with a couple of handfuls of Jelly Belly sweets, Mrs S was gushing about the quality of the dancing, while Daughter 1 explained that her favourite sequence was the cameo by Russell Grant, much to her mother's horror. The walk to Waterloo was dominated by Daughter 1 moaning about a stomach ache and Daughter 2 cheerfully explaining how much fun she'd had. As we crossed the river - for Daughter 2 and I this would be our third crossing of the afternoon - Daughter 1 was back to her normal, enthusiastic chatty and observant self, a pleasantly quiet Tube ride concluding another excellent afternoon of exploring and - I hope - memory-making.

A Canary Wharf Sunday

Source: MJA Smith

Above ground, Canary Wharf's spires of commerce are a thing to behold. The cluster of tall office and residential buildings on London's former docks has a Stateside feel, evoking the design of a more clinically utopian take on Manhattan's Financial District - though the buildings are far, far smaller. Unlike the City, just around the bend in the Thames, the streets and buildings of Canary Wharf are resolutely planned; the City, in contrast, is confusing to me even after ten years of working there, the street pattern having evolved into a seemingly random and inexplicable web of alleys, short dead-end streets and passageways over many centuries. The City's architecture is more austere, mostly stone; the newer glass and steel structures provide jagged aspects of juxtaposed modernity, taller structures nestled up against older buildings, sometimes conspicuously, sometimes comfortably.

Around Canary Wharf, old architecture is hard to find, and fast disappearing. Beneath the shade of the State Street building at Churchill Place, the old Fulton umbrella warehouse is now a pile of part-demolished, twisted metal. In a neighbouring street to where we were staying at New Providence Wharf, we found a row of three of four old workers' cottages, common to nearby Poplar or Greenwich, but against the backdrop of the Ontario Tower and the emerging Swan Streamlight they just looked like vestigial appendages, long since abandoned by architectural evolution and ambition. Billingsgate Market, with its spindly spider's legs cradling the main market hall, looks dated and threatened by the bulk of the nearby HSBC tower, itself one of the few buildings at Canary Wharf with curves rather than sharp, precise edges.

Below ground, Canary Wharf is a confusing web of malls and subterranean access points to the office buildings above. Escalators, elevators and passageways are the principal means of movement here. Doors open automatically into service tunnels and further below still a network of car parks extend far under the waterline. Everything is bathed in fluorescent light and after a while you wonder what natural daylight looks like.

There are two sets of shopping malls at Canary Wharf – Cabot Square and Jubilee Place. Both have the slightly surreal effect of making you feel like you're in a vast airport departure lounge, and the shops are dominated by the upmarket brands that proliferate and thrive at international terminals. I spent some time with Daughter#2 here one Sunday in January; we were in London for the weekend, and on that day Mrs S and Daughter#1 went off to the O2 to watch Strictly Come Dancing. Faced with what turned out to be nearly four hours walking round those glistening corporate catacombs, we took the DLR and headed over to Greenwich instead, providing a welcome relief from tunnel living.

On that particular cold, damp Sunday, the main draw of Greenwich was its vast Royal Park, which I always find more interesting than Hyde Park over in the west, thanks to its rolling hills and the predominance of the imposing Observatory, to which Daughter#2 and I ascended. In this there is a beautiful irony – you escape Canary Wharf's clinical atmosphere only to purposefully take in the breathtaking view of the vast corporate palaces and sleek apartment buildings from the summit of the Observatory hill. Somewhere beneath those towers, I reflected to myself, are those malls and boutiques I'd chosen to escape from that weekend. You'd never believe they could really be there.

There is a great kids' playground in the park, which Daughter#2 thoroughly enjoyed to the point of I-don't-want-to-leave-yet-daddy-waaaaaaahhhhh tantrums that only precocious, unselfconscious two year old girls can produce. Writing this it occurs to me that Canary Wharf is almost entirely denuded of things that would appeal to children, with the possible exception of Wagamama. Heading back to the retail malls when being outdoors got too cold, and before I spent too much money at the Greenwich branch of Music & Video Exchange, we found ourselves sitting in the Jubilee Place branch of Waterstone's where their small stock of books for children distracted Daughter#2 from the abject boredom of pottering around shops we had no intention of buying anything from.

A Snowy London Thursday

Source: MJA Smith

I've never liked snow. I hated it as a kid, though I'm sure I must occasionally have had some fun at some point. Chiefly I associate snow with having to wear wellington boots, which I detested; detested so much that during the bleak snow-filled winters we seemed to have every year in England in the early to mid-Eighties I'd occasionally find myself choosing to be one of the kids who didn't have wellies with them, thus being forced to spend breaktime and lunchtime in the classroom with the kids who had colds or ear infections, or who were being punished, rather than pelting my school friends with snowballs. That and the memory of the trek up the road to my school with my mother, past gutters from which foot-long stalactites of icicles would dangle; a sort of weird Narnia in the heart of the Midlands, past the old man's house with a different Meccano model in the window every day like some sort of out of place Lapland toymaker.

It's snowing in London today. I'm passing through Barbican Underground and there is something peaceful about the undisturbed snow on the disused platform; however everywhere else the snow is already becoming dirty as progressive commuters tramp their cold way to work. That I'm even on a Tube seems mildly amusing – checking the TFL website on the way to Euston, the Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines that I rely on to get me to the office are all suffering with severe delays, though I somehow managed to catch a half empty Met Line service no had than I stepped on to the platform at Euston Square.

I spoke to a native New Yorker this week who couldn't believe how poorly Britain copes with extremes of weather, and it is true. A colleague who lives near Horsham hasn't been able to get in to London the past two days as train services into London Bridge have all been cancelled. He and I were both supposed to be in Edinburgh from Tuesday to Thursday, but Edinburgh Airport has been closed most of the week. The New York guy said that in Manhattan life just goes on as it did before. The Lithuanian guy who works in our building's Starbucks concession also said that back home snow just doesn't bother them, their tyres having chains to prevent slippage. Here, it's complete chaos. News reports tell you how much a day of snow costs the economy, yet nothing changes. Roads go ungritted. Electricity supplies get cut. Intake of hot chocolate increases. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose as they say.

Somehow I managed to get to the office and home both days I've been into London this week, travelling from one of those serendipitously placed corridors north of London where business has carried on reasonably as usual. That said, I could have done with not looking like a complete tit wearing a beanie hat I picked up at some outward bound course somewhere in darkest Surrey a few years back.

Still, there's always the excitement etched on the faces of my two little girls to warm my cantankerous attitude towards the snow. We had the barest dusting of snow at the weekend – literally a millimetre at a stretch – and they were bouncing off the walls with joy, asking to make snowmen and have snowball fights, lying on the carpets and making snow angels. They don't mind wearing wellies either, so no chance of them being the grumpy kid choosing to sit with the naughty and sick kids in the classroom at lunchtime.

As I was trudging across the brown slushy mess that adorned the pavement, I began to wonder why I was even bothering going into the office, given that I only had a bunch of conference calls that I could very well have done from home; then I got to my floor in our office building and took a look outside, and when I saw the City spreading out in front of me covered in a delicate blanket of white snow, I realised that's why I bothered.

Euston Platforms & Big Issue Salesman

Source: geograph.org.uk

I have never become sick of commuting by train from my home to London. I complain about the cost whenever it comes to renewing my season ticket, but I don't really feel that I should gripe too much as it's effectively my choice to spend almost three hours just travelling to and from work. That season ticket has literally been my passport to London's wonders for the best part of a decade and, though expensive, it feels like money well spent. It's really only when power lines fail or someone tops themselves on the line (always at Harrow and Wealdstone) that I moan about commuting.

But there is one aspect which is starting to grate, and that's the terrible layout of platforms 8 to 11 at Euston, specifically platforms 10 and 11 for a period of two minutes after my train pulls in.

The 06.34 train from Milton Keynes Central generally arrives, nice and prompt, into platform 11 at 07.20. I'll then join my fellow passengers in racing to the ticket barriers as quick as possible, because, at around 07.21 a London Overground train will arrive at platform 10, decanting its cargo of passengers onto the already-full platform. Most days the gap between the trains is sufficient enough for me to already be at the barriers when the squeal of the Overground train's brakes gets louder and I'll be well up the incline to the main concourse as the doors are opening. However, just lately my train and the Overground train have arrived at precisely the same time, the effect being several hundred extra commuters hitting the platform together, thus ensuring complete gridlock, pushing, crushing and an unnecessarily unpleasant start to the day as the throng of people tries to squeeze through a tiny bottleneck into the barriers.

Still, it's an annoyance that will be alleviated by the redevelopment work being undertaking to widen the exit, and mercifully it usually only lasts two minutes, after which I'm forced out of the crowd and through the exit barrier like a cork from a champagne bottle. And it's an irritation quickly forgotten when I head past Eduardo Paolozzi's lumpen Piscator sculpture and down the path leading to Euston Road. For somewhere between that sculpture and Euston Square Underground station, rain or shine, wind or frost, will be a person who cheers me up without fail each and every morning.

He sells the Big Issue and is probably the single most upbeat individual you're ever likely to see that early in the morning; animated and unfeasibly effervescent, engaging enthusiastically with the hordes of focussed commuters trudging past him, encouraging them to part with the £1.75 that a copy of the Issue costs these days.

He's rarely without a smile, never tetchy when people blank him and gushingly grateful when you buy a copy from him.

His welcome infiltration of my morning introspection is another reason why I'll never tire of commuting to London.

Starbucks, 90-94 Old Broad Street, The City, London, EC2N 1DP

Source: MJA Smith

I am having professional coaching at present, and one of the things my coach has drummed into me is that I shouldn't hang on to the past. It's a familial trait that has oftentimes prevented me from moving forward, professionally and personally. So it seems rather out of keeping with that counsel to write about the past, but so it shall be.

Walking to a meeting from our offices along Old Broad Street, at typical full speed, I happened to glance across at the branch of Starbucks at 90 - 94 Old Broad Street, on the junction with London Wall and Wormwood Street. The building in which it's situated (I believe it’s called Boston House) is one that I have always adored, fashioned as it is from grand red brick with lighter coloured embellishments, a carved mural just above shop-front height. I've always thought it to be one of the most elegant – if slightly careworn – premises in the City, a reminder of days gone by when compared with the sleek, glass edifices now sited majestically on the immediate horizon. Only today, when I looked across, the familiar signage had been removed and dark blinds adorned the windows. And then I noticed the 'branch closed' sign on the door, and I felt thoroughly dismayed.

This branch of Starbucks has been there as long as I've worked in the City – a whisker off a decade – and has been the scene of one pivotal moment in particular. In September 2002, our department head was killed in a car crash. Coming into work on the Monday, and hearing the news, we removed ourselves from the cloying atmosphere of the office during the morning and regrouped in the below-ground seating area of that very branch of Starbucks to share some collective, mostly silent, grieving.

It was also the scene of many informal business meetings, friendly catch-ups with people who went from being clients or colleagues to good friends, mostly because of the relaxed conversations we'd have in that branch of Starbucks; it was where one of my later managers would proffer his accumulated business wisdom to me over black tea and a 'bun' (his individual, quaint way of describing the assorted pastries and muffins on sale). For a time, it was also a place I'd sneak off to occasionally during the mornings for quiet contemplation and reflection, watching City workers file past, absorbed in their own thoughts, pressures and stresses as I sat on one of the high stools in the window.

Of course, there are Starbucks ten-a-penny in the City, and there are still two branches within a two minute walk of our office; then there's the anti-capitalist lot who despise the very sight of the now-familiar round logo. But me, I'm going to miss this particular branch. London's psychogeography is built upon the ghosts of people and events from the past, accumulated and passed-down memories, blue plaques commemorating famous residents of buildings (despite often being forgotten across generations), other plaques advising of buildings that were demolished centuries ago; for all the memories I have, this branch of Starbucks will loom large in my own personal psychogeography of the City.

Staycation (Part 1)

Source: Business Week

I was sat at work two days before setting off for Portugal with Mrs S and the girls when a colleague came in and pointed out that we might not be travelling after all thanks to the cloud of volcanic ash drifting toward the UK from the erupting Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland. In my usual, news-oblivious way, I hadn't heard anything about it. 'Don't worry,' he said, seeing my look of concern. 'It should be clear by the time you're flying.'

My colleague's news awareness alone was of course not the same as being able to see the future, and by the time our flight to Portugal was scheduled to leave – 8.25 on the Saturday morning – the punitive restrictions on UK airspace had already led to our flights being cancelled, but only after a day of nail-biting concern as to whether we'd have been notified of the cancellation the day before, or whether we would be among the mugs you saw on TV waiting anxiously at the airport for interminable hours anticipating news that wouldn't come; the idea of doing that with two toddlers couldn't have filled me with more dread.

By the end of that Friday evening, Mrs S had already scoured the web and booked alternatives for our break. A day later than we'd been scheduled to depart for the Algarve, we were on our way to Canary Wharf for two nights at the Radisson at New Providence Wharf.

The Radisson New Providence Wharf is a hotel that we've become very familiar with, having stayed here – both with the girls and without – numerous times over the past couple of years. A suite here provides very good value for money for the amount of space you get – a main bedroom, a lounge with fold-out sofa bed for our eldest daughter and plenty of room for a travel cot for our youngest.


Source: MJA Smith

As with any stay in London, the hotel is largely just a base from which to go exploring, and that's exactly how we treated it this time around. Within half an hour of having checked in we were sat in Jubilee Park (above Canary Wharf Tube station), gazing up at the sleek glass curtain walls of the office buildings and eating a picnic in the sunshine. From there, a Tube ride to Baker Street and a wander to Marylebone High Street where we browsed the Conran Shop and Mrs S and Daughter#1 bought bits and pieces from Cath Kidston. A sleeping Daughter#2 and I sat in the Garden Of Rest opposite, a small oasis of tranquillity amidst the clamour of nearby Marylebone Road.

Further down Marylebone High Street Daughter#1 and I bought old postcards of London and a book called Pen Paper Pause by Richard Watkins at a pretty store called Caroline & Friends, before purchasing Lauren Child books in Daunt. Daunt, an independent bookshop, has a beautiful stained glass window on the back wall and a great range of travel books in the gallery upstairs and basement. While Mrs S and Daughter#1 hit the Little White Company shop, I found a rare Inspiral Carpets 12" single in the Oxfam next door. It was an afternoon of turning up such treats.


Source: MJA Smith

From Marylebone High Street to Hyde Park, escaping the touristy clamour of Oxford Street in favour of Wigmore Street, though still finding ourselves crossing Hyde Park Corner along with everybody else. It was no surprise that the park was busy with the obligatory sunbathers and footie-playing lads, given that it was a warm Spring Sunday afternoon. The girls ran about while we had a much-needed rest. Again missing Oxford Street via a walk along Grosvenor Square, we caught the Tube from Bond Street back to Canary Wharf and had a poor Wagamama experience in Jubilee Place, including Daughter#1 barely eating, me throwing food down my t-shirt and after 20 minutes of waiting, the discovery that the waiter had forgotten to order my yasai chilli men; when it finally arrived it was so spicy I fully expected to pass out eating it. But he did deduct it from the bill.

The following morning we walked from the hotel to Canary Wharf and had breakfast in Kruger at Cabot Square; it wasn't cheap and the service was a bit off, but the food was nice. From there we caught the DLR to Island Gardens to pass under the Thames using the Foot Tunnel into Greenwich. The lift was working on the North bank, but not the South, which meant I had to lug our buggy up the stairs – I lost count of how many there were after about forty, but the burly lift operator on the North bank reckoned gruffly there were 'about 'undred'.

We hadn't been to Greenwich before, but it lived up to all the expectations we'd built up from people who had told us about it, and, if we hadn't had plans for the afternoon, I'm sure we'd have stayed there for longer. Instead we made a beeline for the park, had a drink at Cow And Coffee Bean and let the girls have a run around in the kids' play area. As if dragging the buggy up the steps from the Foot Tunnel wasn't exhausting enough, pushing said stroller up the hill to have a picnic at the top very nearly did me in, but it was worth it for the views across Canary Wharf and the City alone.

That afternoon, we took the sleek and graceful Thames Clipper to Bankside Pier and visited the fifth floor of the Tate Modern, figuring that the displays of Cubist, Vorticist and Futurist art would appeal to the imagination of two toddlers, and were proven correct. Daughter#1 loved the Warhols, Ruschas and Lichtensteins, whereas Daughter#2 gravitated worryingly close to the sculptures until a packet of raisins persuaded her back into her stroller.


(c) 1984 Ed Ruscha

We headed back to the hotel via the Cafe Rouge at Hays Galleria, which is a reasonably safe bet for kids' food, and Tower Bridge. Tower Bridge with a stroller from the South Bank requires a lengthy detour along Tooley Street, which is almost as long as the walk across the bridge itself. But it does offer some great views along the length of the bridge.

On the Tuesday we schlepped across to Covent Garden and were there before things really got underway at 10.00. With the sun shining and few people around (compared to normal), such parts of the West End are so much more alluring than they are at busy times, giving you space to appreciate the architecture and elegance of the area without constantly bumping into other people engaged in either the frenetic act of getting somewhere or just ambling about cluelessly.

Source: Fopp website

We passed Kiefer Sutherland on Earlham Street en route to Fopp. Fopp used to be an independent record shop until it went bust and was salvaged by HMV. The Earlham Street store has kept the Fopp branding, and also the more liberal-minded approach to its stock compared to its more universal parent. I bought CDs by Brian Eno and Television; for Mrs S it was Grizzly Bear and Ed Harcourt. For Daughter#1 it was just fun to look at the CD cases and picking out the ones she liked the look of.

A dash back across the Jubilee Footbridge to the London Eye brought us sharply into touristville, but mercifully our pod on the Eye was almost empty. Mrs S and I had been once before, on a cloudy Autumn morning. On this April Tuesday it was bright and sunny – and plane-less, naturally – which allowed for far better views than we'd had before. The experience of seeing the whole of London laid out was only marred by Daughter#2's insistence on tearing around the pod and having a major terrible toddler tantrum; the two combined caused me to experience vertigo for the only time in my life so far.

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Source: unknown

So, that concludes part one of our unexpected staycation in the UK, and a trip to London that included more traditional (child-friendly) tourist haunts than I'd normally elect to go to. Okay, so it wasn't as relaxing as Portugal would have been, but that's to be expected when you go to London.

A Wet London Monday

Go to: Audio Journal / twitter.com/mjasmith


Source: Rory (Flickr)

Like most places in the South East of England this morning, the square outside Euston Station was lashed by wind and rain; it's usually a ersatz wind tunnel but today you could feel the gusts and swirls inside the station building well before you stepped outside.

Out along Euston Road I passed the upturned skeletons of about five dead black umbrellas. It was like the place where umbrellas go to die; an umbrella graveyard if you will.

Watching the Met Line train pull onto the platform at Euston Square, it was so steamed up with condensation that it was impossible to tell how busy it was until the doors opened, while on the train itself the floor was so wet you couldn't put your bag down.

Just by the Dashwood building there was a stripped skeleton of an umbrella that looked like it'd been ravaged by a wild beast rather than what they're calling, in typically understated fashion, 'inclement' weather. Inclement weather simply sounds mildly irritating, not like the type of weather to wash Cumbrian towns slightly closer to the south.

At the queues for the lifts there was a young woman in a skirt that was shorter than her jacket (which wasn't exactly long in the first place). There was me soaked to the skin and wrapped up for a blizzard whereas she was dressed for a night out in Newcastle.

In the café on the floor of our building the barista moaned that the weather meant he was going to be rushed off his feet because people who would usually go out for coffee would go to him instead. Someone else in the queue pointed out that it's still possible to hold an umbrella in one hand and a coffee in the other, but the barista – looking increasingly deflated as the queue got longer – just shrugged dejectedly.

A London Saturday

Go to: Audio Journal / twitter.com/mjasmith


Source: www.all-hotels.com

This post comes to you from the Radisson Edwardian New Providence Wharf Hotel after a long day spent trekking the mad streets of our capital with my wife and two daughters, all three of whom, incidentally, are fast asleep. M has just fallen face-first into today’s Times but I’ve whisked it out from her just in time to prevent newsprint transferring amusingly verbatim to her skin.

The occasion is that M and my eldest daughter are off to see Disney Princesses On Ice at the O2 tomorrow, and we thought we’d make a weekend of it. We’ve stayed at the Radisson Edwardian before, and its location is ideal for the O2 (you can see that squat arachnid-esque form just across the water) and Docklands generally. Plus it’s good value: we’re staying in a suite for no other reason than it gives the girls their own room, and it will set us back a reasonable £199, with breakfast included. Not bad.

My TomTom didn’t think so on the way down. Many a time will I rue being too miserly to upgrade the map software, for the postcode to the couple-of-years old Radisson isn’t in the version I have, and I only found this out to my detriment on the way down. Consequently the journey here involved travelling down both sides of the Blackwall Tunnel and me getting extremely stressed every time the landmark building next door to the hotel receded further into the distance.

We had no sooner dropped our bags in our room than we set off for Canary Wharf whereupon we enjoyed a simple, fussless meal in Café Rouge. Nothing special, but always good for the kids. I had quiche champignons, which was a touch too rich, while M and the girls all had fishcakes which were thirst-inducingly salty.

It’s been a clear, fresh day in the capital today with not a cloud in sight, which made for perfect conditions for inching slowly around the West End along with everyone else. We took the Jubilee Line as far as we could thanks to engineering works, alighted as the train terminated at Waterloo, then took the Golden Jubilee Bridge to Charing Cross, past the skateboard graveyard occupying one of the concrete bridge supports and on to Trafalgar Square, Haymarket and Piccadilly Circus. All major tourist haunts of course, but the girls loved it, and I found the buggy pretty useful for carving my way through the hordes of slow-moving tourists. If anyone reading this was on Regent Street at about 4.00 PM and is nursing a sore ankle from someone ramming their pushchair into your legs, that was my fault, but I’ll stop short of apologising.


Source: Diggers Abroad / Flickr

Just off Regent Street is a small, serene little arcade of individual shops called Quadrant Alley, where right now – and until February – you will find a funky little pop-up shop for all things Marmite. Though we didn’t venture upstairs, it sounds like there is some sort of ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’ type exhibition thing going on up there. As we were buying our Warhol-esque Marmite plates, fridge magnets and postcards (such suckers for needless ephemera we are), the cashier asked me if I loved Marmite or hated it. Saying that I liked it, for I do, earned me a big ink stamp on the brown paper bag showing the world my Marmite-loving credentials. She asked the same question of S, my fussy three-year old eldest daughter, and was greeted with the wrinkled nose and sour expression of distaste that toddlers are so often to be found proffering.


Source: http://www.marmite.co.uk/

From there we edged our way to Hamley’s, which we’d built up into a massive thing for the girls, and which – on a busy Saturday on the approach to Christmas – was a waste of time. I waited fifteen minutes for a lift, only to emerge out onto the third floor (girls toys) where I couldn’t actually move. I spent longer trying to get to the floor than I spent looking at toys, and besides, S was too bewildered by the sheer volume of people to actually enjoy it anyway. Far better it seems to eschew the touristy crush of Hamley’s in favour of your local Toys R Us, where you can actually breathe, and where everything is at least 10% cheaper.

Seeking to escape the madness of Regent Street, we ducked into Fouberts Place and thence to Carnaby Street, the two interconnecting homes of the sixties Mod menswear revolution whose mad, hippyish Christmas lights put the staid minimalist grandeur of those on Regent Street to shame. A pavement table at a Starbucks on Great Marlborough Street offered solace, hot chocolate, a chance to rest four pairs of weary feet and a great view of Centre Point and a mural on the side of one of the buildings.


Source: MJA Smith

Taxis often offer the best views of London, and so it was with the cab we caught from Soho to Canary Wharf, whose route treated us to views of some familiar London sights – St. Paul’s, Tower Bridge, the Tower of London – and some of my personal favourite buildings along High Holborn, including the Waterhouse masterpiece Holborn Bars, built as the headquarters of the Prudential.


Source: EZTD / Flickr