Another London Weekend

On Tuesday Selwyn arrived from Europe.  He has been travelling the world on his own since about January, an amazingly brave step.  I have really enjoyed our travels so far, but even more have I enjoyed having Grant to travel with!  Selwyn just needed a place to stay for a couple of weeks exploring London before his return to NZ.  I couldn’t believe it when I picked him up at Woking station and he had only one small back-pack, just like the sort of thing a student uses for a school bag.  Talk about being able to travel light!

We had defrosted a leg of lamb ready for Mark and Paula and the girls on Sunday, but since they had not been able to make it we saved it for Tuesday and gave Selwyn a treat.  It was great timing, as he had just told his mum how much he was looking forward to a roast lamb.  

Of course we still had to work through the week, but Selwyn had plenty of London exploring to do.  We did make sure to take him out to our local for a beer and a meal one evening.  On Friday Grant had his first day trip to Brussels too, so he was very late home that night.  Selwyn was a very good sport about having to watch Dr. Who.

On Saturday we all went up to London to check out the Borough Market.  This was is a busy, bustling feature of a Saturday in London and we were very pleased to find a delicious bacon buttie for breakfast.  We were staying in London for the whole day though, and going to a house-warming party in the evening, so we reluctantly stayed away from the delicious bread stalls and amazing cheeses we saw.

We had hoped to take Selwyn to see Les Miserables in the afternoon but there weren’t three tickets left together, so instead we took advantage of the lovely weather and went up to the Tower of London.  This was one of the few tourist attractions Grant and I had visited on our 2006 trip to London but the weather was very different.  We remembered a dismal day with dreadful rain, and finally giving up before seeing the whole place.  On this visit, we found ourselves wondering just how much we bothered to look at last time!  We spent the whole afternoon exploring the various Towers and reading the fascinating history behind it all.  Much of the important history has turned up in Sharon Penman’s wonderful novels, so I thoroughly enjoyed reading the popular versions too.

We especially enjoyed the Crown Jewels, although I still struggle to believe that a clear stone nearly the size of my fist can really be a real diamond.  Surely a really big diamond is still only knuckle-sized?

After the Tower, we headed up to Kensington where Grant’s colleague was having her house-warming.  We were too early, so we went to a nice local pub for a quiet drink before going to the party.  It was nice to meet some of Grant’s colleagues and the evening got off to a good start.  We did need to make our home before it got too horribly late though, as it is a long trip on the Tube and Southwest Trains to get home from that part of London.  I managed to persuade Grant to leave not long after 10.30pm; Selwyn decided to stay as one of Grant’s colleagues had a sofa he could crash on and he was really enjoying the party.  We finally got home at about midnight, in time for Grant to watch the All Blacks play Argentina.  I managed to sleep through most of it.

View from Karen's rooftop balcony 

On Sunday morning we got ready to go back to London to rescue Selwyn – but he turned up before we left.  He had decided on his commute back that he had been away from home long enough.  He wanted to catch the bus out to Heathrow and see if he could get an earlier flight back to NZ.  So we walked him to the Heathrow bus before heading into town in search of coffee.

Mark, Paula and the girls came for dinner that night but we got lazy and ordered curries rather than cooking a big meal – and anyway, we had used our roast on Tuesday!  The company was still great and we enjoyed caching up on their news as a fine finish to our weekend.