Cold Comfort

Well I'm back from the 'smoke'. It was not a smooth journey however. I left the apartment at 11 and headed to Paddington to catch my train. Now I had bought an advance ticket but thought I'd change it and just get an earlier train. How much d'you reckon they wanted to change the time of my train from 15.48 to 12.30? 

£48! That's $117!

That would have made my single ticket from London to Gloucester cost £60.50. For a two hour train journey. I think that's a bit steep but when I said as much to the woman in the ticket office I got the stoney silent look. Obviously you pay the price or get stuffed. It would have been cheaper to get my dad to drive from Gloucester and pick me up, even paying the fuel and congestion charge. So I thought I'd just put my bags in the left luggage and go back into town. Now obviously there are no left luggage lockers anymore, terrorism you know, so you have to pay to put your stuff with the company who has the contract for left luggage. This costs a bargain £7.50. Per item. Per any part of 24 hours. So £15 for two bags. Now call me a tight ass but I am not paying that much for some one to look after my bags for two hours. So I spent a lovely couple of hours in the freezing cold at Paddington station marvelling at the amount of junk food available at the average UK train station.

So a few final observations on London made while wandering around on Sunday:

There forty-seven churches in the City but are only four are open on a Sunday, the rest are only open in the week (plenty of bankers need a place to pray at the moment). I found this out in St Vedast-alias-Foster, which must be up there with weird ecclesiastical names. Why does a church need an alias? Been testifying against the sports centre down the road maybe? Actually I think St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe wins in the funny name game. Anyway St Vedast was just beautiful inside, especially with the organ playing and the soloist practising for the sung Eucharist. It's enough to make an atheist cry. In fact I do love a church, even though I am an un-believer. I think you'll find most atheists love religious buildings whereas your average born-again, happy clapper would be perfectly happy praising in a high school gymnasium. Anyway the point of this is another example of that long history you come across in Europe. St. Vedast was founded in the 12th century, destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666, rebuilt by Wren in 1697, damaged by enemy action in 1940 and finally restored in 1967. I was told this by a lovely lady setting the church up for the morning service. Who I eventually realised was Josephine Tewson, who played, amongst much, much else, Mrs. Bucket's neighbour in Keeping Up Appearences. Eventually a real celebrity.

There seems to be an obsession with sausage and mash at all the restaurants and pubs. You can get it anywhere. There is even a chain called S&M that sells only sausage and mash, they have the franchise to supply food on the Thames fast ferries.

The Barbican is a love it or hate it kind of place. I have to say I love it but most people hate it. It was built in the 60's on a massive bombed out section of the City as a kind of upmarket council estate. All the flats were rented by the City to lawyers, bankers and doctors as well as people from all walks of life. It's a vision of what the future was supposed to be like; all raised walkways, rough concrete and glazed tiles. All the pedestrian areas are separate from the traffic and it is a total maze of passages, stairwells and lifts. Unlike all the other concrete high rise developments in the UK of that period though this one worked. It never turned into a sink estate (probably because it's always been full of middle class people and therefore much closer to Le Corbusier's original theories) and now the apartments in the high rise blocks command prices in the millions. I don't think there's many left that still belong to the Council.

Is there anywhere else in the world that has a working meat market right in the middle of it's Capital city? Sitting on some of the most expensive real estate in the world. It's like having a butchers in the middle of Wall Street, or a vegetable market on the Sydney quays.

Finally I realise that the English are truly a forgiving lot. There is a memorial to William Wallace at St Bart's hospital. Now I know some people see him as a hero (after all one person's freedom fighter is another's terrorist)but the fact remains that he was an enemy of the country for quite a while and was executed as a traitor. But the English still let a memorial go up to him. Can you imagine a memorial to Ho Chi Minh in Sydney or a statue of George III in Boston? I really can't imagine any other country doing this sort of thing.

Does that make the English noble or just daft?