London Day 5: Storefronts

Oxford Street, London, at dusk 

26 December 2024

The events in this post took place on December 18, 2024.

Attendant after breakfast, best cortado

Wallace Collection after failed attempt to revive Jack’s Lloyd’s account

Oxford Street

Dinner with Mazz and Graham

When I opened the curtains in the morning, the sun was out! It cast light onto Saint Pancras and the clouds behind it.

We walked over to the Greek restaurant for breakfast, stopping for a picture of the Banksy on the rear wall of our hotel. It was protected by a frame of glass or plastic. Whether they paid for the art or it appeared on its own, we don’t know and The Standard ain’t saying.

We’d been told that window cleaners would be abseiling this week, and here they were.

Jack pointed out that we were sitting under abseiling Santas at Nonas.

I had a little coffee with breakfast, but I really wanted to get to the Attendant, a men’s public bathroom converted to a tiny coffee shop. I’d directed Heddy to the Attendant when she’d been here over Thanksgiving. She reported that the best cortado of her trip was there.

I ordered a cortado. It was the best one I’d had so far on this trip. I told the barista as much. And after that, I stopped ordering cortados. What was the point?

We weren’t far from the Wallace Collection, one of the free London museums. Inside an old mansion were rooms full of knight armor and fancy clocks. There was a small collection of glass.

(Pause to upload photos I hadn’t originally included. Hmph! This midair upload is faster than the hotel’s!)

I had to take pictures and text them to my glassmates right away.

Outside, in the dusk, a pigeon rested on a window ledge.

Jack knew I was looking for storefronts decorated for the holidays. We were near Oxford Street, so we went there en route to our bus back to the hotel.

There were crowds here; it’s always crowded. We ended up close to Selfridge’s, a block-long department store whose displays did not disappoint.

The sun went down. The overheads lights came on.

We met Mazz and Graham for dinner at the brasserie in the Fitzroy Hotel. We went to the wrong restaurant at first (ours was down the hall), but I got a photo of part of the lobby before we found that out.

From my seat at the restaurant, I could see a reflection of the outside decor in a mirror on an inner pillar.

There were Christmas trees, garlands, and lights everywhere we went, so much so that it became part of the scenery and I stopped noticing it after a while.

On our way back to the hotel, we passed a trans rights crosswalk and that made me happy. I ought to have taken the picture from the other side, where the instruction to pedestrians would have said, “look left,” which is more appropriate. “Look right for oppression” would have worked too.