serinde

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.