Miscellaneous London Guff

A compact and bijou gallimaufry of photos left over from our trip to meet Robyn last week.

Mum in St.James's Park just before it started tipping it down.
I often walk to work this way, as you know, and this is always a lovely place to pause. Looking down the lake has the added benefit of pointing my arse at the Parasite House.

Swans. Nuff said.

I'm always on the lookout for baps and peepees for Ame, so here are some rather fetching man-baps from Easter island.

And my favourite horsie from Elgin's stolen horde.

And that cute temple just outside the Parthenon Room at the B.M.

Some useless bling.
Sure it looks great until you put it on and you can't move your arms.
Crap!

And just for a change, a picture of Jesus NOT riding a dinosaur!

One For Ame, One For Peahen, One For Lynn

Robyn's flying back home to the States in the early hours of tomorrow morning.
Sigh …
I miss her already.

So as I'm a bit of a tart I'll make mysef feel better by doing a post for some other lovely ladies.

One for Ame.

Woohoo! One of London's gay taxis that you love so much.

One for Peahen.

The Tiffany corner of the Art Deco room at the British museum.

And one for Lynn.

The missing caryatid from the Erectheion in Athens, stolen by Lord Elgin. The model for your lovely "Cheltenham Ladies".

Hey guys. I'm lonely. Who's coming to visit next?

Robyn

So …

I know this isn't Robyn; it's my Mum.
We are wandering along The Embankment, as I do on my normal walk to work, except we are heading to Westminster Abbey to meet Robyn.

And here's the Abbey.
In front of which a taxi (disappointingly not pink, Ame) disgorges Robyn's Mother-in-Law, Elizabeth; Robyns' Daughter No.2 and Robyn herself!
Woohoo!

These three rather cute butts belong to: (from left to right):
Daughter No.2, Robyn and Dive.

And these four rather cute fronts belong to: (again, from left to right):
Elizabeth, Dive's Mum, Robyn and Daughter No.2.
Doing the touristy bit as Americans are wont to do in front of Parliament.

Above Daughter No.2's head proudly stands one of my heroes, Ollie Cromwell, facing the Parasite house, sword in hand, just in case the monarchy gets any uppity ideas.

The Abbey's ass is much prettier than its face.
Much like Dive.
Hey ho.

And here IS a pretty face. The lovely Robyn, marching along the riverside toward Tate Britain.

Unfortunately, we chose places to meet where cameras aren't allowed, so there are no shots of us in the Abbey, where we had a lovely time in Poets' Corner, found lots of fun people's graves and discovered a French Horn sitting in Handel's lap (symbolic of what, I wonder).

More touristy posing to make up for the lack of photographs of Robyn and Dive standing over David Livingstone's grave (well we presumed it was his … sorry) and Elizabeth joking that she remembered him from school.
Or of Dive (the man who irons tea towels and boxer shorts) complaining about all the dust on the statuary inside the Abbey.
I may well break in there one night and clean it.
Also there's some beautiful stained glass for Peahen to check out, especially the peacock blue window with Oscar Wilde's memorial in it.

We also discover that some poor guy named Vincent, who had led a sufficiently honourable and upright life to warrant being buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey has now had a coffee shop built over him. The counter actually cuts his gravestone in half so we cannot discover his surname.
Ah, Mammon … Welcome to the House of God …

And so on to Tate Britain, one of Dive's regular lunchtime haunts (my office is only a couple of hundred yards away).

We have to skip the modern art because Mum only stands in the middle of the room and moans loudly about how she can't understand any of it.
In fact we do pass a Blomberg by accident and even that sets her off.
Thank goodness Jake and Dinos's "Machines for Living" exhibit has been removed … all those prosthetic genitals and rubber chickens would have produced apoplexy.

If you ever need to find me on a rainy lunchtime, a good place to look is in front of Millais' Mariana and Ophelia, which hang together side by side and which I have loved all my life. Being able to visit them daily and spend time with them is so much cheaper than buying them.

Or down in the Clore Galley, in the little room with Turner's late and unfinished "light" paintings.

Oh, and in the Tate café you can get miso salmon on a bed of wild rice with wasabi dressing for under a fiver and a good selection of green teas.
Boffo!
I eat that.
The girls order quiche … WHY?

Robyn and Elizabeth outside the Tate with Dive trying to look tall by standing on a step.

Smile!

How cheeky is that grin, young Robyn?

And so, reluctantly and all too soon, we wave Robyn off in a taxi, back to her hotel.
Rats.

But we did have a lovely time. I only wish it could have been longer.
And no we are not touching one another's bums in this photo!

Station Break

Well.
Tomorrow's the day.
I won't be posting because I'll be dragging my old carcass down to London Town to meet the cute little girl with the big ball; our lovely blogpal Robyn.

When Blogs Collide.

There will be photos.
But probably not until Thursday.

Summer's Here

Sing along, everyone:
"Summer's here and the time is right for wading in the streets" …

This morning's gentle rain (this is St.James's Park on the way into the office today, with the swans being antisocial) has got a bit grouchy and mutated into another one of the lovely thunderstorms we have been having for weeks on end.

This is Rochester Row, just outside my office, about five minutes ago.

I did say to Robyn before she set off from sunny Ohio, "Bring a brolly".
Some swimwear might be handy, too.
And wading boots (sexy).

Ame had the good sense to come to London in February, when the weather was fine and there were no queues for anything.
Robyn will spend most of next week queueing for stuff in the rain.
But hey! That's what British Summer is all about.

Ricketybus

Meet the Ricketybus.

This is decidedly NOT the sort of thing Robyn has just flown across the Atlantic in.

This is the old Rig Air DC3 of my childhood; the "hop over to Holland if there's no headwind" Ricketybus mentioned in the previous post. The one with old plastic bus seats screwed to a plain plywood floor, no toilet and no food or drink except for a grumpy man handing out barley sugars when we came in to land.

It used to take us one and a half hours to get from the WWII airstrip at Norwich to gleaming modern Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam, and two and a half hours coming back against the prevailing wind.

The sputtery old warhorse's main job was ferrying oil and gas workers to and from Scotland to be helicoptered out to the offshore rigs; hence "Rig Air", and it cost £9 return to Amsterdam (those were the days).

It felt kind of embarrassing parking this thing in amongst the gleaming TWA Boeing 707s and BEA Vickers VC10s, especially for a plane mad kid like me.

The date on the back of this photo puts me at nine years old. Yikes! Was I ever that young?
One thing I do remember about Schiphol Airport was my first encounter with automatic doors. I didn't want to drive into Amsterdam; I just wanted to run in and out of the airport to make the doors open and close. Wheeee!

Hey ho.

Class

Watch the skies.
Today is the day when the US launches the long awaited phase two (the "Surge") of its invasion of Europe (if you remember, phase one resulted in a troop withdrawal after some bastard stole Ame's handbag).

Our very own blogpal Robyn and her indomitable troops will be heading for the airport in a few hours.
In a chilling - but hopefully more comfortable - re-enactment of the D-Day landings they will be invading France; garlic-scented land of cheese-eating surrender-monkeys and … er … freedom fries, where they will take the advice of the US government in that hostile country and constantly mutter the mantra "Nous sommes Canadiens" to everyone they meet.

Once insurgent France has been subdued and a Bush-approved "democratically" elected government installed Robyn's invasion force will tunnel their way to Blighty, where they will encounter old Dive and get comprehensively photographed for your entertainment.

Robyn will of course be flying first class.
In all my decades of carefree and wholesale dumping of greenhouse gases into the upper atmosphere I have flown in a startling array of aircraft, from the ramshackle to the downright dangerous, but never yet have I sampled the rarefied atmosphere of "First Class".

I first flew in 1959, in a Viscount turboprop with proper curtains at the windows (I can't remember if it had a fireplace but it probably did).
The "hop over to Holland as long as there's no headwind" rickety DC3 of my childhood had old hard plastic bus seats screwed to the floor and no toilet and the height of luxury we attained was being offered a barley sugar to suck (yes, they really did used to do that).
That was when Norwich Airport was a grass airstrip with a portacabin for customs, containing a plywood desk and an old weighing machine from Norwich railway station.
Ah, the pioneering days of aviation.

I asked Robyn what first class is like.
Apparently they don't have to spend eighteen hours queueing at a complaints desk at the airport; they actually have comfy chairs to sit in and flunkeys to kill any screaming children.
Then once they are in the air a flight attendant actually attends to them!
They are given booze!
Within the huge, ultra-comfy chairs are concealed tiny Thai ladyboys who massage their every extremity!
And they have real FOOD!
Tonight while I sleep, Robyn will be hurtling across the Atlantic feasting on larks' tongues and otters' noses and delicately nibbling her still twitching braised baby panda on a stick, while small third world children in rags blow on her if she's too warm or crouch in front of her seat so she can put her feet up.

Me? I fly Marxist class.
And I stopped eating airline food decades ago.
Here's the reason why:

I have eaten and thoroughly enjoyed some truly disgusting things in my life, from raw whalemeat to wasabi chocolate (although I am proud never to have set foot in a McD or a KFC and I will never let that crap anywhere near me … I have to draw the line somewhere).

But the "meal" that stopped me eating airline food was on a charter flight to Portugal in the eighties. I was veggie back then and it was so long ago that the airlines hadn't got a clue about veggie food.
With truly awe-inspiring professionalism that kind of gave the game away about the level of efficient organisation we were dealing with, the stewardess asked for all the vegetarians to raise their hands.
Inevitably there were far more raised hands than veggie meals on the plane as regardless of the number of people specifying the "vegetarian option" when booking our tickets, the airline always provided three (count 'em) veggie meals per flight.

Normally I wouldn't have bothered on a short haul flight but this time I was hungry, so after much argument I was eventually handed a small plastic tray about the size of a paperback book with a "V" scrawled on the top.
Upon examination it was found to contain a spoonful of cold sweetcorn and a spoonful of grated carrot (the non-veggies had the same thing but with a bit of cold grey gristly stuff in the corner and for no discernible reason an olive).
It came with another, slightly smaller tray containing the "side salad". Which, when poked in a desultory fashion turned out to consist of a spoonful of cold sweetcorn and a spoonful of grated carrot.
Absolutely true.

Robyn, enjoy your flight.
See you next Wednesday.*

*Ha! That's one for the film nerds.
Anyone (except Full) want to claim ten credibility points by explaining it?
And don't "Wiki" it; you're only cheating yourself.

The US Invasion Of Westminster

Westminster Abbey this morning

This is where Dive and his dear old Mum will be meeting Robyn and her American invasion force next Wednesday morning.
Cameras will be brandished and I'll post up the results.

We will have elderly folk and Robyn's number two daughter with us so don't expect an Ame style "Baps and Peepees" experience.
We don't want to get thrown out of the Abbey (though Robyn has expressed an interest in Thomas Hardy's body parts … ahem).