A couple of things - this will cover Saturday and Sunday, but if anyone really wants to spread the process of reading about my weekend away then I will tell you when to look away and you can pick it up again there tomorrow. It's a bit like having to avoid football scores on the news and Huw Edwards says "If you don't want to know the score, then look away now". If I was Huw Edwards, though, I'd wait just a couple of seconds, for the nation to turn away from the screen, and then shout out the score as loud as I could. Perhaps on my last day.
So yes, Saturday. Really, after the dizzying highs of Friday night the rest of the weekend was bound to be conducted at a lower pace. Accordingly we bummed around the flat until about eleven and then leapt on the train to Borough Market for lunch.
The Duke of Edinburgh gives his daily blessing to the nation on all channels and in all major public places.
Borough Market is the single most middle class place in the world, and by that I mean the posh end of middle class. The kind of Dads who carry their babies in titanium framed papooses whilst Mum looks at the organic cold-pressed extra virgin olive oils and gluten free hand-baked Polish breads. Companies that sell four hundred different types of coffee bean. Prominent use of the word "Welsh", for I know not what reason. Stalls exist which sell nothing but one type of cheese. Very nice cheese, but if the bottom falls out of the Caerphilly market, Euros Morgan of Borough Market will suffer badly, and at twenty-three quid a kilo that's avery selective market to begin with. It is a different world. It is also where my friend Dave had had three mobile phones stolen in two years and someone gets their pockets picked ten times a day.
I had a lovely organic lamb kebab with home-made garlic Tzatziki on an authentic Minoan flatbread (I will stop, this is starting to sound like an M&S Food commercial), but at four pounds fifty it couldn't have not been delicious or blood would have been spilled. I also bought a chocolate brownie so chocolately I went blind. Flour came second on the ingredients list after chocolate. Felt sick and dirty, more dead than alive.
Then to the South Bank.
Home of Tate Modern, the Globe Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall but most importantly, South London's biggest smack shooting gallery. You don't get this kind of information in a Let's Go guide, do you?
We walked, bought expensive ice lollies (cherry brandy and cider lollies - childhood nirvana, but I don't remember them being one fifty each) and then hit a huge crowd at the Festival Hall, there for the Festival de Cuba. We didn't linger as the crowd was one of those that would set off claustrophobic episodes in people who live in a wardrobe. The sheer density of morons was challenging as well. I heard an Australian woman saying very loudly that she was sure churros had meat in them, despite being stood under a sign that said "Vegan Friendly" in big yellow letters. I don't know, perhaps she thought it meant that they were merely well disposed to vegans, as opposed to selling things they could eat. Add the people who don't know how to walk in a crowd without fucking everyone else off despite millions of years of evolution as social animals (the stall selling Mexican wrestling masks will still be there in half an hour; keep walking or else three hundred people will tear you to bits and throuw the pieces in the Thames) we decided not to linger. It was unpleasant, and thirty five degrees. We retired to Streatham Hill for the rest of the day.
We in fact came back a couple of hours later to watch the National Theatre's excellent production of Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt Of The Sun. All about Aztecs, conquistadors and tragedy. Very, very good. It was a big slice of old-fashioned Brechtian design with peerless performances from Alun Armstrong and Paterson Joseph (you now, him out of Hustle). I was inspired enough to hit Amazon's zShops and buy a load of second-hand Edward Bond and Peter Shaffer plays - I used to read that kind of thing for pleasure but haven't in ages. Time to start again. Anyway, during the interval we stood on the high balcony of the NT and breathed deeply of the miasma that London makes in the Summer - pollen, pollution and eight million people's used air. I was very happy.
Sunday was another boiling day. We ate breakfast and then hit Tooting Bec Common. We took water, sun lotion, straw mats, guitars and an aerosol of some disgusting stuff that Louise bought called Magicool. It, apparently, cools you down in the heat. I just though it smelled of chemicals and not good huffable ones, at that. If you say the name fast enough, is sounds like "magical", but that's not a good enough justification for such a crap product. If you're hot, either stand under a tree or move to Iceland. Simple. You can buy cans of scented oxygen as well these days. Christ on a bike.
This is James, by the way.
And this is Louise.
Look, she's shy.
Really the weather was a bit too hot. The British go mad at the first sign of a sunbeam. Barbecues are lit all along the nation and 40 million cans of Carling are drunk every hour. The redtop tabloids head to Bournemouth to photograph comely 19 year old women in bikinis as soon as the thermometer hits 20. We take off our shirts and head for the park, garden or beach, turn red and then complain of having sunburn. The Australians, a society famous for spending 250 out of 365 days a year without going indoors at all, know how to do it right. Slip, slap, slop. They also have the bulk of the hole in the ozone layer, so you can say they have more incentive. That's as maybe. We are just stupid. So we sat under a nice big tree full of Britain's only wild parakeets playing summery tunes to the uninterested but mercifully tolerant people of Streatham and felt very happy with the world. Then it was time to go home.
I headed back to St Pancras on the 59 Death Run, driven by a bug-eyed driver who missed most of the stops, jumped red lights and tested the roadholding ability of a double-decker bus to its limits. This happens occasionally. London bus drivers are a strange breed. Argue with them and they will destroy you. I once saw one on a 91 at Aldwych shout at a mouthy woman (who was, by the way, entirely wrong) so loudly that he left a haze of spit on the inside of his violence-proof screen. Those things work both ways. Perhaps they are driven mad by the screens that are appearing on buses now that show a constantly-repeating four-minute loop of E! News reports about Ashlee Simpson and the cast of Desperate Housewives. It was quite harrowing, all told.
Good Night, And Good Luck
Dougal
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