Today we relocated from Bath to London.
To our relief, the car was still in one piece at the park-and-ride after being abandoned for a couple of nights. We loved our short stay in Bath, though it wasn’t quite as genteel as I remembered… perhaps just a sign of the times.
Since it was still early, we thought we’d detour to Solsbury Hill. The lanes leading there felt more Cornwall than Somerset, all narrow hedgerows and blind corners. We reached the start of the track but never got out… there was nowhere obvious to leave the car.
After that, smooth sailing. Back to the big smoke before we knew it. We dropped our bags at the hotel (conveniently beside Paddington and the Elizabeth “Lizzy” Line) and headed straight into the Saturday crowds. Perhaps London really is busier now. Perhaps I’m out of practice. Or perhaps the endless selfies, videos and phone-led zig-zagging has robbed people of spatial awareness. Whatever the reason, it was thick with people. Still, with no timetable of our own, we drifted enjoying the buzz.
We paused at Taylor’s of Old Bond Street (the venerable barbers now on Jermyn Street, where I used to buy my shaving potions), then wandered through the arcades, gawping at all the frightfully pretty things in the windows. From there we threaded into Soho, before a nostalgic stop at Imperial China in Chinatown. Never the best Chinese in town… but when New Diamond was packed, it was my fallback. The staff reassured us gluten-free was doable, so after a quick hop back to the hotel (how easy the Lizzy Line makes it) we returned for a feast… crispy seaweed, crispy aromatic duck, crispy chilli beef. L had vegetables.
We then wandered back through now quieter streets (past the neighbouring houses of Hendrix and Handel) to Bond Street. The spotless new Elizabeth Line station is already suffering the marks of London life … ghostly greasy marks on the walls from people perching on the benches. The solution? Cover the stains with silhouette “art.” Amusing. Almost as much as spotting Reading as a Tube destination.
And then, as we neared the hotel, we were stopped in our tracks by “Real Time”, Maarten Baas’s extraordinary clock. Utterly mesmerising. London, we decided, is back on good terms with us (helped by the fact the tubes are running again).
The Obligatory Blog 