England Nov 2024, day 4: Travel and London

Transfer day! We got up, had one last excellent breakfast, gathered our traps and headed to the train station (somewhat trammelled by crowds amassing for the local Remembrance Day parade). We obtained pies and beer for the journey - and tried to get some Wensleydale to bring back, but the local cheese shop only had it in wedges, not transportable wax-sealed rounds, alas - and met Beth on the platform. The train back was equally comfortable and swift, though we had some confusion around "why are some seats reserved when our booking didn't let us reserve them"; as well, there were a party of dowagers next to us who were rather whooping it up and drinking fizz at 11am. On the one hand, loud; on the other, I am pretty sure this is my future, so I steered my an annoyance into a Good For Them!.

At Kings Cross, we wimped out chose the path of prudence and got a cab to the hotel, which was about 15 minutes away in any form of transit, because London. The room is...not quite what it was painted on the website, but meets minimum viable, and the staff seem nice. I dropped my bags, turned around, and walked back to the British Library (right next to Kings Cross, yes) to meet Beth, where we did a double-header of their two exhibitions: "Life in Ancient Dunhuang" and "Medieval Women In Their Own Words". The former was small, the latter very large, and both were excellent. We had about half an hour at the end so went up to the regular gallery, which has stuff like the Magna Carta, Shakespeare's First through Fourth Folios, &c &c. At that point, the museum was closing and my feet were absolutely killing me, so we limped over to St Pancras for drinks at the refurbished Victorian booking office. The drinks were of course way expensive, but quite good; and our timing was excellent because it seems that, at 5:05pm every day, they mix up a big bowl of rum punch in the middle of the bar and serve it forth to all and sundry. So that was cool. (If you don't know why St Pancras / the Midland Grand Hotel is cool, go look it up. It's worth your time.)

However, the bar only serves (expensive) nibbles, and because it was Sunday, all the other restaurants in the refurbed part of the hotel closed early, so we wandered out to the lounge area that's in the hotel lobby, formerly the taxi pull-through between the hotel and the train station, and had perfectly acceptable (if again, overpriced) fish & chips. We took a brief walk through the old hotel to see the beautifully restored Grand Staircase - you may have seen it in the video for the Spice Girls' "Wannabe", or for most of my readership, in the Neverwhere episode "Down Street" - and then Beth headed out to her airport hotel before flying home, and we returned to base. It was only about 8 by then but we were knackered, so watched a bit of telly in bed (one episode of Alan Cummings riding the Flying Scotsman, and one episode of Wolf Hall) before lights-out.

England Nov 2024, day 5: cheeeeeese

Another night of not sleeping so well; no obvious cause, though I suspect "internal screaming intensifies" might be part of it... We were awake before seven, which was tidy since we had given the hotel people 8am as our desired breakfast time. The food was reasonable, though paled in comparison with our nosebag in York. Got our act together and walked over to the British Museum at opening time.

My main goal there was the "Silk Roads" exhibition, which was excellent, and I enjoyed it a lot. Obviously, this being The British Museum™, there is a certain amount of awkwardness about how they got some of these objects (I'm looking at you, Aurel Stein), but still, it was very well put-together and was stressing - or more accurately, patiently explaining to Eurocentric white people - the rich and textured exchange of goods, ideas, and beliefs across half the planet for over a thousand years. It is quite deliberate that the first object, by itself in the entry hall, is a tiny Buddha statue made in modern Pakistan and found in Sweden.

Well, I spent a lot of time there, and my foot hadn't recovered from yesterday's exertions, so I was happy to limp over to the cafe in the Great Court for a cup of tea and a piece of "Christmas Slice" (this is like a bar cookie to us; pastry base with, in this case, a mince-pie-filling-ish layer on top). We then wandered through the upstairs eventually getting to the medieval bits, and I said hi to a few old friends like the big hack-silver pile, but I wasn't up to a lot more. At length we went over to Southampton Row and found a pub for lunch, splitting a perfectly fine steak & ale pie washed down with Old Peculier.

From there we walked down to Somerset House (which is in the middle of being set up for the holiday season with a skating rink and market and all that) and over Waterloo Bridge, taking photos on route, ending up at the British Film Institute (BFI). We had a glass of wine and rested our aching feets in their cafe, and though tempted by the 6pm showing of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", instead took a bus back across the river to Seven Dials to

drum roll

THE PLACE WITH THE CHEESE CONVEYOR BELT

This is in a large, extremely hip food hall inside a former warehouse (and for all the extreme hipness, a lot of the places in there looked like they'd be worth investigating). We have eaten much cheese and had a bit of wine and then we staggered home, because alas most of our points of travel are in orientations where it's just as fast to walk as to take p*bl*c tr*ns*t. I am sitting and typing this with a random program about the Gunpowder Plot on the telly waiting to see if I am going to explode.

Hotel room does not have a bathtub so I cannot soak my feet. Contemplating just riding a bus around all day tomorrow.