Oooookaaaaaay.
26 December 2024
Hello from somewhere over the Atlantic. I’d tell you where, but the map app at my seat isn’t working. It’s almost 6:00 p.m. GMT. We left England about 3 hours ago. This fight was overbooked, and we found ourselves upgraded from Premium Economy to Business Class. I’m in one of those cubbylike seats, where, if I want to talk to Jack, I have to lean forward and look back across the aisle to his cubby. I have oodles of legroom and lots of places to stash stuff. The cabin lights are off as a favor to those who prefer to sleep at 6:00 p.m. or 1:00 p.m. or whatever time it is wherever we are over the Atlantic. My overhead light is too far back and too dim for me to read the book I was reading before they cut the lights. For a while I couldn’t get the Wi-Fi I’d paid for because signing into the app required an internet connection (derp), and when I paid as a guest, the app cut out on me right at the confirmation stage. But I’m on now and I have nothing but time to yammer on . I’m clearly out of my element up here in Business Class. I’m not one for fawning flight attendants, pre-flight champagne, a hot towel, or a full lunch menu. I do like having all this space though. It makes typing on this cheap keyboard easier. Anyway, if I don’t get to blogging, I won’t finish blogging before we land.
The events in this post took place on December 15, 2024.
Our hotel room wasn’t like any I’d been in before when visiting London. The Standard was renovated recently, but the designers decided to go with the late 1960s aesthetic of the building’s shell. That meant glaring color combinations and eyeball lamps. The windows curved outward, their curtains extending past the glas.
A long hallway stood between the bed and the door. The bathroom had no door, only a sink and a glass shower stall. The toilet was in another nook, closer to the room’s entrance. It had a door, but no sink. Between the toilet room and the shower room was an indentation with a suitcase rack and a rod with clothes hangers. Jack took the rack. I put my suitcase on the window sill, which was wide enough to sit on.
There was a curved sofa next to a round table, and a metal mesh nightstand that I claimed for my hearing aid and phone chargers.
We slept right through the hotel’s breakfast service, so we ended up at the Pain Quotidien in Saint Pancras station for breakfast at noon.
One thing that’s changed since the last time we were here is that the menus have calorie counts on them. How one can turn a 150-calorie bowl of oatmeal into 700 calories is beyond me. I found something less intrusive on my sketchy relationship with food.
This would soon be undone, I was sure, upon the next sighting of any English candy I hadn’t set eyes on in five years.
After we ate, we walked around the station. Along the original walls, there is now a continuous row of glass shops. Standing in one means being able to see all the way down.
On the upper level, one can look down across the length of the station. There was more behind us.
The British Library is almost next door to the station, so we walked over. I stopped to get a picture of the hotel side of the train station.
We went to the library’s exhibit on Medieval women. Not that we ever saw the sun, but by the time we left the library, it was on its way down. I took some more pictures of Saint Pancras beyond the library’s courtyard walls.
Turbulence and iPad touch-screens do not play well together. I have to reorder these randomly-uploaded pictures by touching the screen.
London at Christmastime is full of lights hanging from street trees or strewn above the roads. It wasn’t dark enough for these lights south of the library to have come on yet.
A few minutes later it was dark enough.
Google Maps had told me there was a worthy candy stall in Covent Garden. This being Sunday, we figured it might not be as crowded. On our way over, we passed an unnamed building that I decided I needed a picture of.
Covent Garden was. So. Crowded. But we were there, so we pushed through. There was a giant decorated tree in the center of the square.
By the time I’d found the stall and, before that, another one accidentally, Jack was miserable. The crowd had put him over the edge. His shoulder was sore from carrying his luggage or sleeping on it wrong or something, and he wanted a massage. As we walked out of the crowd toward Seven Dials, he saw a storefront advertising walk-in massages. I said I’d wait inside for him, but the place was oozing with woo and had a bad cell signal. I decided to wander for half an hour instead.
We used to visit Covent Garden and Seven Dials a lot way back when. There were several bead shops, and Jack once scored a set of antiquarian books for next to nothing at one of the market stalls. There had been an old-fashioned English sweets cart set up at Seven Dials. None of these things exist anymore. There were no shops I was interested in, nor young enough to stop into. I took pictures of the holiday lights instead.
This is Neal Street, I think.
This is the middle of Seven Dials, where seven roads meet.
There were more of those annoying, hot-pink bike carriages.
I went back to the woo emporium to fetch Jack, and we headed out towards the hotel. He felt better. We passed a storefront that left us mystified.
There were several signs warning people that they’d be fined if they peed in the streets. There was a QR code for locating the nearest toilet.
We met a friend, also visiting London, for dinner at the Blue Door at the Montague hotel near Russell Square. On our way back to the hotel, we passed by a holiday tree at the edge of the Brunswick Center.
We were still awake at midnight.
We slept for 10 hours.
Again we had breakfast at noon, this time at a Greek restaurant called Nonas on Judd Street. After that, we went to Judd books again, this time for a longer visit.
Then it was off to the Sampler in the Islington section of London. The Sampler puts out expensive and vintage wines around the holidays. Jack put a wad of cash on his Enomatic card and paid dearly for 25-ml pours of the good stuff.
Meanwhile, I scoured Google Maps for a candy store, the ones I’d frequented in past years having all disappeared. I found one that looked promising over in Kentish Town. We’d never been to Kentish Town, so we boarded a London Overground train to take us west. The overground lines have all been renamed after significant places or people, which is great, except now there’s no way to know where they go by what they’re called.
On our walk from the station to the shop, we encountered a friendly mackerel tabby who, upon seeing his person, trotted around the corner, which was also where we were headed. His person said, “I see you’ve met Jackson Cat. He knows he’s not allowed past this corner.”
Once he returned to his permitted turf, he hung around our legs and let us get in some good rubs.
We turned another corner and I could see from afar that the shop I was after was closed for the day, despite Google Maps having said otherwise.
But now we were at the northern edge of Camden Town. When we regularly came up here 30 years ago, we were just about too old for the place. We went in anyway. What used to be a variety of stalls selling anything from cheap silver jewelry (I still have the rings I bought here) and crafts was now dozens of stalls selling the same cheap silver jewelry and another dozen selling the same useless touristy trinkets.
We did find the used bookstore buried in all the sameness. A used copy of one of the books Jack wrote was prominently displayed. I suggested he go to the clerk and offer to sign it. Jack said no.
I took some pictures, and then we too the Northern line tube back to the hotel.
The Regent’s Canal passes through Camden Town.
I suggested we try Indian food for dinner. The restaurant Jack wanted to go to didn’t have any available tables, so we ended up on a street with three Indian restaurants next to each other. The hosts stood at each door, trying to draw people in. We picked one, didn’t like the menu, and went next door instead.
We had concrete plans for the next day. We’d take a train up to Oxford tomorrow to meet one of Jack’s friends for lunch and two more for dinner.
Okay. That took a bit more than an hour. I’ll keep going until my keyboard battery gives out. I can’t charge and type at the same time. I tried.
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