Feels like...

I'm always a little bemused by the weather reports which say things like "The temperature at the moment is eight degrees outside, feels like three".

Actually it was eight degrees when we ventured outside today, but it didn't feel like three, it felt exactly as though we should wander off to Notting Hill and spend a few hours hanging out in The Windsor Castle where perhaps we might get a few plates of serious pub nosh, some pork chops with leeks and mash perhaps, or even an ox-cheek pie.

So we did.

Out and about on Good Friday

If one is intent on visiting the Tower of London, there is in theory a quite simple way of obtaining a hefty discount on the admission cost.  This involves purchasing an overland train ticket for transportation to the venue on the day of entry, filling in a small form, providing photographic ID, and politely declining to pay the "voluntary" donation fee tagged to the ticket price which would go some way towards offsetting the cost of the rail tickets.  

If one doesn't live within cooee of an overland rail station, there are no trains going anywhere near the chosen attraction and it's Good Friday, a day when in London life slows to something akin to a speeding bus going over a very small speed bump, the simple method outlined above becomes more convoluted.

Undeterred, having managed to obtain said tickets and in the process wangling a hefty £40 discount for our little troupe, we eventually found ourselves outside the Tower of London, where the guide books tell us two million people each year queue to see the crown jewels and other less savoury artefacts from its gruesome past.

The guidebooks may have omitted to mention that the majority of those two million people visit the place on Good Friday, having first queued at Paddington station to obtain their discount vouchers, this does place an enormous pressure on those visiting the ancient complex to "move along please, move along.  Thank you".

So much pressure to "move along" is exerted while viewing the actual jewels that one is actually conveyed on a moving walkway, travelling even faster than the bus mentioned earlier.  There would be no time for photographs even if the use of a camera were allowed.

After a few hours of jostling in a crowd which felt at times as though we were in sideshow alley at the Ekka on "People's Day", we retired to the calm of one of Julian's lunch time haunts, the Roman wall that once formed part of the fortification of the city of London.    The remnants of the wall stand in the very shadow of the Tower, amid and through modern structures, standing silently almost unnoticed.

The wall is more "our" kind of "attraction", of the kind which lie waiting to be rediscovered, offering time to contemplate the contrasts between now and then, to wonder what might have been or might be in the future.   The openings in them give glimpses of other eras, but there is no explanation needed from the audio guide, no grating explanations read loudly from a newly purchased guidebook.

We can happily report that once again we've "visited" the Roman Wall, and finally after all these years that we've "done" the Tower of London.

While mentally scrambling over the exposed surfaces of the wall, it occurred that there was an obtuse connection to Easter as well.  After all, if it wasn't for the Romans…..

Window Shopping

It's getting cooler by the day, although the forecast keeps pushing the negative temperatures away till tomorrow, pretending that the ice isn't coming at all.

As we were wandering aimlessly round Notting Hill today in temperatures not quite in double figures, I did wonder at the appropriateness of the shoes in the window displays.

There was also a bit of wondering as we peered into the windows of the Funeral Parlor with their cheery displays "honouring the victims of the Titanic" and more wondering whether there is a monthly celebration to be held, of mega-death through history, and incongruously probably due to brain freeze, why the coffee we had with our lunch doubled in price because we "ate in".

Later, I uploaded a few dozen Sunshine Coast Daily photos to be published in coming months, and wondered if the sky was ever really that blue, and whether people really did wear so little in the way of clothing in other places.

How quickly we forget.

Timing

I didn't get my timing quite right this year.

It is our custom to prebook just two things on our annual journey and make the rest up as we go along. These are our return flights to London and our Eurostar ticket to France, which we contrive to allow us two weekends with the kids and a bit of time in between to visit other friends out of the City while the family members are off being busy executives.

This year, we landed on a Monday, which was exactly the day after the first weekend we'd hoped to be here for, and booked to leave the following Monday, puzzled at why travel was so expensive on that day. Sure, it's obvious with the benefit of hindsight and a calendar, but we usually eschew both of those things which is why we inadvertently booked to travel back to France on Easter Monday.

This gave us a bonus few days with family of course, but also meant that we had insufficient time to travel to the midlands to make our intended visits this time round, so we are stuck, oh dear oh woe, with filling in our days wandering around Hyde Park and thinking warm thoughts and feeling enormously grateful to our offspring various for giving us the opportunities they have over the past decade.

By choosing as they have to live in London, each in turn, we've been compelled to visit as often as we've been able, and astonishingly when we total our visits, we've actually lived here in the City for five or more months. When we wander along the banks of the Serpentine as we did today, stopping at the Lido for coffee, then across Hyde Park past the Prince Alfred memorial to Kensington itself, it is not as tourists we travel, but as residents,  people for whom these surrounds are familiar.  We are here often enough to notice subtle changes between visits.

We can gauge progress on construction works, see how last year's ducklings are going, or wander among our favourite trees watching as the buds develop on every branch, half-wishing we would still be here for the explosion of colour which will take place in a week or two.

We popped into the Science Museum today mid our meanderings, and quite coincidentally spent an hour or so becoming acquainted with the history of time keeping and clocks. It seems that it is really only since the beginning of the industrial revolution that man has been conceptually bound by time.  Before the invention of the clock, deadlines as we know them simply did not exist.

I am not sure that I believe that entirely, but I like the thought. The concept of living in a timeless state is an admirable one, and we have determined to undertake the pursuit of that state of being with some vigour.

Tomorrow.

If we remember.

Another day another market

We hadn't been to Camden Markets since before the fire that burnt out all the good bits; the antiques and bric-à-brac chaps. On a post-breakfast whim, we, after deciding that we are rather fond of the whim and promising to use it more in our planning this year, determined to make use of what was undoubtedly the last sun of the week, and head off in direction Camden Town.

With a forecast temperature maxing out at a mind numbing eight degrees, we took our jumpers out of the bag, the ones from the outdoor clothes shop back home, and wandered off wondering how it was possible that two people who just two days ago felt quite cool sitting on a verandah as the evening temperature plummeted to twenty-two, could now feel quite comfortable comparatively scantily clad in a climate which would be perfectly placed inside a device used to keep beer chilled.

The markets themselves did not disappoint, full of colour in the broadest sense,  and plagiarised Banksy postcards made to look original by large signs forbidding photography.   Without the Beatles, Princess Di and Banksy, and perhaps to a lesser extent that other well known Brit, Marilyn Monroe, there would be no printed tee shirts and seven hundred unemployed vendors in Camden I think.   It's a shame that such a great opportunity to present original work is squandered in the name of putting food in the mouths of the stall holders children.

Perhaps it's a bigger pity that there are so many prepared to pay actual money for this stuff that the stall holders thrive.  One vendor read the label on my jumper as we wandered past and called me over, "Kathmandu" he exclaimed in a somewhat excited tone, continuing with "Have you been there?"

Alas I explained, I hadn't but it is on our list of places to go, people to see, and I did add by way of explanation that on this occasion the word served merely as a brand for stuff that keep us warm.

He seemed a little taken aback, "It's the capital of my country," he explained, adding in a puzzled tone. "How can they sell out the name of my country's first city like that?"

He could see there was nothing I could do to rectify this travesty, shook his head in disbelief and offered us two Banksy original-copy tee shirts for the price of one.

Three... err I mean TWO!

As we walked from Paddington Station to Bayswater this morning, clattering our bags across the cobbles, even through our fatigue we could not help but notice the delicious liquorice monochrome of the trees, still leafless, almost as they were when we left them six months ago.  Once again we succumbed to an overwhelming feeling that time has simply stood still in our absence, as though we were returning the day after we left.

This feeling is neither deja vu nor surreality, perhaps it's between the two, as though we live in two parallel worlds instead of being conscious of the fact that we are actually living a string of consecutive experiences.

Jetlag has much to answer for.

Two, quite coincidentally I'm sure, is also the number of minutes it takes after boarding an aeroplane for me to remember how much I really don't like being encapsulated in that particular manner, and as it happens it is also the number that exactly represents the temperature when we arrived in London this morning.

Despite rumours to the contrary, spring has definitely not arrived, there is decidedly no heatwave and the blip on the records which showed a twenty degree maximum for a day or two last week was just that, a blip.

Perhaps one of the benefits of experiencing the numbness that jetlag brings, is that it leaves our senses oblivious to the temperature, or maybe that was due in part to the jackets that we had thoughtfully carried with us as we boarded to be used in the unlikely event of a thirty degree drop in temperature.

April Fool's Day

Suddenly, the banging together of our heads has stopped.  We are packed, we have left, we have said our goodbyes and returned the rental car.

We have passed the gates which signify that we have left Australia, are sitting quietly in no-man's land, watching the almost empty international terminal below, and a familiar but surreal emotion engulfs us, as we pinch each other and wonder if the last six months actually happened.

Tomorrow when we leave the silver tube that will have been our home for 24 hours, we will be in London, living a life we left behind in late September.

We feel jetlagged and dislocated at the very thought of it all.

Perhaps it's just an April Fool's Day joke