Katie And Dive Do London Pt.3

4:40AM on Wednesday morning and I wake just a few seconds before my alarms but missing this morning is my usual wail of anguish, which has been replaced by a big fat grin and a "Woohoo!" as I throw off the duvet and head for the shower.
No work today! It's Katiefest! Yay!

If my train is behaving I should be at Katie's hotel around nine o'clock for our second day of pounding the streets of London in search of fun, culture and mosaics.
The interweb tells me my usual train - inevitably - will be delayed so I dash around like a mad thing, hurling on clothes, grabbing my camera and driving to Norwich in nutjob GTA-style to catch the early train, on the way drying my hair by sticking my head out of the window.

The early train gets through okay which results in me sauntering around the charming Georgian crescent toward Katie's hotel at around ten to nine just as she - by delightful coincidence - steps out of the door to test the air and decide whether or not she will need a coat.
Catching somebody by surprise and watching their unguarded expression as they recognise you (the split second before they can plaster on a smile) is a great way of gauging how unwelcome you are and seeing Katie's face light up will keep me smiling all winter long.

Knowing she was in Lara Croft mode, the night before I had scoured the web for London mosaics and made a hit list.

First up was just around the corner and one tube stop away: Eduardo Paolozzi's gloriously trippy transformation of Tottenham Court Road underground station.
I'll just post this taster as Katie has taken loads of photos for a series of "Mosaic" posts (coming soon to Katiefornia … Don't miss it).
For anyone who doesn't know the station the entire thing, from platforms to surface, including the escalator tunnel is covered in strange and wonderful mosiacs and it is well worth a visit when you're in London simply to stand and wonder just what on earth Paolozzi was smoking at the time.

From there we wend our way to the river (whenever anyone visits me in London they find themselves walking alongside the Thames and across the Westminster parks a LOT) and Katie gets an eyeful of the Eye, which she will be riding the next day with Rose.

And looking the other way, who should we see peeking over the Embankment wall? None other than good old Big Ben …
I know, I know: if the pedants would stop screaming at me for a moment I can assure them that I am well aware it is just the bell itself that is called Big Ben; the tower is actually known as "The Clock Tower Of The Palace Of Westminster".
Well bollocks! Like everybody else I call the whole bloody thing Big Ben and will continue to do so.

Here's a way of making Big Ben look gooooood … Photograph it with a chic Berkeley girl on a sunny day.

Here's where it all goes wrong: The Houses of Parliament, infamously anagramised by Old Dive to become "The House of Rampant Lies" (s'true; check it for yourself).

Right across the street from Big Ben is Westminster tube station, where Katie and I - following Dante and Virgil - descend into "The Hole", the seemingly never-ending and gloriously infernal escalator ride into the roiling bowels of the earth, passing Hades on the way down (don't forget to wave; you never know where you might end up) to the deep, deep platforms of the Jubilee line extension.
This brand spanking new (well, fairly new) and exceedingly fast tube line (known as the "jubbly", much as the Waterloo and City line is known as the "drain") is the quickest way from Westminster to London's aptly named financial and banking sector, the Isle of Dogs, where we shall be rooting around beneath Canary Wharf hoping to bag a wonderful series of mosaics.

While we're on the subject, the bankers have another poetically named DLR train station just next door to Canary Wharf; one that should really have given us warning of where our money has gone … the station is called Mudchute.

One whizzy and hi-tech tube ride later we surface several miles downstream at Canary Wharf's mega-spiffy new station, a must-see for any visiting architects or indeed anyone who simply wishes to point and laugh at bankers.

1 Canada Square, known to Londoners simply as "Canary Wharf" (a similar but much smaller tower block beside the train line out of Liverpool Street station is known locally as "Canary Dwarf").
My train ride gives me a great view of this building and in the evenings the sunsets reflect off the metal façade and turn the whole thing into a gorgeous pinky orange confection. It has a huge glass pyramid roof (not visible from down here), like a mega version of the Louvre pyramid and you get some truly awesome sky reflections off it.

In a wise and prescient move they built London's financial centre around the old docks so that stricken financiers can safely jump from their skyscrapers and merely go "splash", rather than "splat".

Katie knows someone who works in the CityGroup building behind her. We decide that they have enough woes on their hands without seeing smiling, happy people on vacation so we leave them alone and hunt mosaics.

We are heading for Wharf Walk, a pictorial history in mosaic that guides us through the Jubilee Place mall beneath Canary Wharf.

Between 2000 and 2002, boffo mosaic artist Emma Biggs painstakingly installed this beautiful stone and glass mosaic series illustrating an eclectic range of the goods and wares that passed through the original dockyards of the East India and West India docks just outside.

The London Basin was for hundreds of years almost solid with sailing ships bearing goods from the farthest reaches of our glorious Empire to be consumed in the slathering maw of the Great Wen.

Read Dickens (especially the pursuit and death of Bill Sykes) for a stinking, slimy, festering, mud-spattered, smoke-blackened, shit-encrusted, scratch-and-sniff depiction of the area in its hellish heyday.

Wading gloopily across the current financial pismire, possibly the best use for the Financial Times is to rip the thing up and wear it, like this elegant lady posing with Katie.

Halfway along the Wharf Walk the aroma of freshly ground coffee grabs us by the nostrils and drags us - not entirely unwilling - into Nero's.

Cappucino for Katie; Americano for Dive (black, of course).
It seems - in addition to our money - that the bankers and financiers of London can not be trusted with glasses and our free iced waters come in paper cups. In the Norwich branch they keep a stock of glasses in the freezer, thick with frosted ice and give you your water in those; much nicer.

Much to the relief of the planet's remaining chelonia, most tortoiseshell is now made from plastic.
We didn't used to simply tear off their shells and throw the rest away; my Victorian copy of Mrs. Beeton's Household Management lists several delicious chelonian recipes.
She helpfully gives figures for how many terrapins you will need per person/pie and delights in such handy hints as "Be sure to break the turtle's legs before putting it into the pot as otherwise it will struggle manfully to liberate itself".
Remember that the next time you cook one.

Here's one for Peahen.

I'll leave you today back in Westminster with a tiny Katie photographing a … er … big Big Ben, and incidentally attracting an admiring glance from the guy in the striped teeshirt.

In tomorrow's post, Katie and I will be hitting the parks as the sunshine gets serious.
Expect eye candy (and I don't just mean Katie).