London

We’ve had a very fruitful couple of days here in the English capital.

It was lovely reuniting with hubby again. We’re staying in the Savile Club, via a reciprocal arrangement with Simon’s (much cheaper) club in Wellington. Unbelievably, women aren’t allowed to be members here, but I am permitted on sufferance as a guest. It’s in Mayfair, just down the road from Claridges. It’s a fabulous old building, look at the informal dining room where we have breakfast.

We are surrounded by upmarket menswear shops and car dealerships – Rolls Royce and similar, but there is also a lot of redevelopment going on. Much construction work, cranes, jackhammers, and workmen talking in Northern accents.
Yesterday we visited Buckingham Palace which was also very nice. I was concerned there may be a dress code but that didn’t appear to be the case.

I’m a big fan of the royal family, I bet the French and the Americans wish they had one. Great for tourists.

The place we’re staying is very central so yesterday we just walked everywhere. Thankfully it’s been cooler here in Britain which is why I’m not having any more trouble with blisters. We had predinner drinks last night at the old Scotland Yard police headquarters which is now a hotel. From there we went on to Rovi, as arranged by our travel companions, Kirsten and David, many thanks to you both. It’s a popular restaurant which did very interesting tapas-like meals. Delicious.

I’d booked online on my new favourite app a tour of the secrets of the London Underground for this morning, they took my payment and everything, but then they cancelled last night because they didn’t have a guide available. It will be interesting to see how long the refund takes.
Instead we spent the day at Greenwich. We got there on the new Elizabeth Line tube, definitely the loveliest public transport I’ve ever been on. At Canary Wharf we had to move onto the overground train which we inadvertently didn’t pay for. You can use your credit card for all public transport here which is extremely convenient, but neither of us saw anywhere to swipe on until it was too late and we were already on the train. Whoops. A 50 pound fine if we’d been caught I believe.

At Greenwich we did an audio tour of the observatory which took much longer than we’d anticipated. Here is a photo of the Meridian line, with Wellington marked.

There was a detailed history about timekeeping and the problem of finding accurate longitude for shipping, any astronomical details were only of secondary importance. Simon got a video of the red ball dropping at 1pm precisely which I will spare you.
From there we walked into Greenwich for a pub lunch, and then on to the Cutty Sark, an old tea clipper sailing ship. It used to bring tea from China back to the England. Unfortunately the Suez Canal rendered it obsolete as steam ships could then do the trip faster, so it changed to bringing wool from Australia. The audio guide touched briefly on the Opium wars, a shameful if cunning moment in UK history. Essentially they engineered mass addiction amongst the Chinese to improve the balance of payments deficit. Long live the Empire!

To get back into town we took the Uber boat, essentially a ferry service that goes up and down the Thames. Again you can just swipe on and off with your card, which was more rigorously policed than on the train.