I have always had a love hate relationship with London.

I love the idea, I love the energy, I love the history and I love the overall buzz.  I hate the heat, the walking, the rudeness, the tourists (excluding myself of course) and the way you always feel like you end the day with a dirt and salt crust on your face.

Many of my trips ‘down south’ have been work related and so maybe that hasn’t helped the overall view too much.  Most of the trips outside of work have been with the wider family and so I seldom get to do the things that I would choose to do if I were in charge of the agenda.   No complaints, no problems, I just know that what I am into isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and so put the rest of the family first.  

Imagine my surprise on Christmas morning when I opened up an envelope from Titchy and found that my gift was a weekend in London with a pre-booked agenda for the two of us to spend the weekend doing all the things that I would have chosen.

It was the perfect gift for the man that puts others first, other than the fact that I had to cope with being the centre of attention and that never sits well.  

We left Newcastle at half two and made great progress all the way to Peterborough.  We had just pulled out of the station and the train came to an  abrupt stop.  It took a little while for an explanation but we were eventually told there had been an error in the signalling sequence which meant that we couldn’t continue until the system had been reset.

As we waited, I noticed that the train driver made her way past our seats and was moving to the other end of the train.  Sure enough, a few minutes later we were told that we were going back to the station.  It was only a few hundred meters back and so we were there in no time and we were informed that the driver had had a nasty shock and so we were waiting for a relief driver.  Time passed, our new driver arrived and we were underway over an hour late.

With no further adventures en route, we arrived in London and made our way to the hotel.

We were staying in the Premier Inn Hub at Westminster Abbey which was a short walk from St James underground.  We were in the basement but the room was clean, modern and perfectly decent.  The only downside was the view,  a concrete wall and a few inches of pigeon shite.

We washed, unpacked and then headed out for dinner. We turned down the options right next to the hotel on the basis that they were too fancy for our dressed down state.  Without a clear plan, we made our way through the mainly residential streets looking for somewhere to rest but didn’t chance upon anything that wasn’t too posh and not too scabby.

I knew for a fact some of the busiest parts of London were just around the corner from us, but we were walking in the warm, still evening, hand in hand, through totally empty streets.  A weird calm in the otherwise storm that is London.

We made our way through Tufton Street and came out on Abingdon Street, with a lovely view of the House of Lords, looking lovely in the early evening sun. We fought our way through the tourists past the House of Commons and ‘Big Ben’ and decided to walk along the Victoria Embankment.

It’s a walk that I have made many times before in the past but always along the river bank, this time we decided to make our way through the absolutely immaculate parks.  We took in memorials for the Fleet Air Arm, the Korean War, the Chindits, General Charles Gordon, Henry Bartle Frere and James Outram.

At this point we were getting hungry and half of the party was getting ‘hangry’!  We checked our phones for direction and decided that we would be best off heading towards Trafalgar Square.   We were tempted into a pace called Little Frankie’s on Whitehall.

It was pretty expensive for what it was, as you would expect in a tourist area, and was pretty much bang average, but it was just what we (one of us in particular) needed.  

Replenished with energy, we walked around the corner and through Admiralty Arch and along The Mall. Admiralty Arch, by the way, I learnt has been sold and is being renovated into a swanky hotel.  This was just a few weeks after the coronation and a lot of the bunting and flags were still around.

It looked simply wonderful.  Again, with the noise, bustle and crowds of Trafalgar Square just a few hundred meters behind us, we walked down towards Buckingham Palace with just a handful of joggers and only maybe a half dozen couples walking past us.

We made our way down to the end of The Mall and followed the path around to the right.  Everyone else was fixated on Charlie’s House, but we were drawn to the almost perfectly ignored Canada Gate.  Again, I have been here many times over the years but have never really appreciated the beauty and gravity of this hidden-in-plane-sight entrance to Green Park.

Maybe it had been freshly painted for the Coronation, maybe it was the way the gold paint glinted in the evening light or maybe the gates are closed during the day, I’m just not sure.  But they looked stunning.

We knocked at the door to see if Charlie was taking guests but to no avail.  So we slunk away heading back to the hotel.   We spotted that there were three Royal Mail vans parked up inside the palace gates.  To be fair to Postman Pat, it takes some balls to ask the residing monarch if you can park your van on his drive.  It just shows, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

We walked along Buckingham Gate.  Other than the people that live or work there I think that this is a street that hardly anyone has heard of but it is a perfect example of what London is.  In the space of around two hundred meters, we walked past the Peruvian Embassy and the High Commission of Swaziland which had an incredible golden boat nailed to their front porch and then we walked past a building site that had a wall of kindness.  You can take a coat if you need one and leave a coat if you don’t use it anymore.  This is London.  Glorious buildings, the centre of power for the country, decision makers left right and centre on streets that no one that can name and acts of kindness all mixed together in one huge melting point.

We stopped just around the corner from the hotel at a bar called The Feathers that overlooked St James Underground station.  Titchy asked for a G&T and I ordered a rum and cranberry juice.  The chap that was serving us had a little brain fart and put the gin and rum into the same glass and was about to throw it away.  It seemed like a waste so I told him to top it up with the mixer and I’d drink it.

He asked if I was sure and passed it over to test it.  I asked him his name and, to the day I die I swear I heard him say ‘Colin’.  I named this heady cocktail the ‘Colin Special’ and gave it a go.  I thought it wasn’t too bad at all but I was in a small minority on that front.    I thanked ‘Colin’, I mentioned ‘Colin special’ a few times, I told the other people behind the bar that ‘Colin’ was going to be famous; in short I said ‘colin’ a lot. 

We sat down at our table and Titchy asked if he was really called Colin as that wasn’t what she had heard at all.  When I went back to the bar for the next round, I didn’t order another Colin special by the way, I checked and, you guessed it, he was called Connor.

On that thought, we made the short walk back to the hotel for a well-earned nap and we were ready to go on day 2!