The Mays take London

The first thing that I had booked for myself on this London trip was actually a beard trim and a cut throat shave two doors down from the MI6 building in Vauxhall. This was a curious choice, I know, but my reasoning was that a long flight was going to make my body feel like crap, so a bit of pampering immediately afterwards would help to level things out. And it did.

Bulgarian barber Misho Isaev barely spoke a word to me for most of the service. But he was so methodical and particular that I was completely relaxed throughout. And as with any kind of grooming, you only realise afterwards just how much your face needed an intervention. I emerged onto the streets of London feeling renewed and ready for the 50 selfies I was about to take as part of the modern tourism regime.

But the first point of order was a coffee. The coffee at Pret a Manger is not up to an Australian standard. Far be it from me to try and shame the hardworking and underpaid baristas of Pret a Manger. But, that being said, the fact that they would serve such insipid, weak, ugly, careless coffee to me - to *me* - is a sickening outrage for which they will never be forgiven.

Mum and Dad took the tube to our humble Vauxhall techno-podule while I was being pampered, so when we were all reunited, I insisted that the first thing we do is get coffee. Not Pret-water. Coffee. Dad thought that Trafalgar Square might be the place to visit first up, and Mum had an inkling that there would be worthwhile coffee inside the National Gallery, so we walked down to the Tube station which is right outside our door and went to... oh, I don't know where. I'm still getting my head around the names of Tube stations. Embankment. St Barnabus. Tooting Bec. Tooting Valerie. Lumple Green. Snuffington. Nog. I need to learn Tube Station names.

I'm used to galleries looking like Roman Temples. Sydney is like that. San Francisco was like that. But this one was absolutely gigantic. After a salvific coffee, Stuart and I decided to go and visit Holbein's "The Ambassadors" - which was also gigantic - and to spend our time on the Renaissance floor saying hello to Raphael and Titian. Raphael's Crucifixion and Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne made up the three moments of absolute awe.

We went around the corner to a pub called Chandos which also had a giant poster of the famously dumped Ariadne. This was the London pub experience par excellence: English food, wooden stylings, vintage posters, and an Australia barmaid. What could be more English?

After that we walked to Buckingham Palace (I heard Mum call it "Buck Pal" which is what I will only call it from now on) which was more exciting for Stuart than it was for me. I was staring daggers at the statue of Victoria, that old slag. London really feels and looks like a Victorian city, as if the Victorian world just fell out of the sky and buried every other London beneath it.

We took the journey to back to Mum and Dad's place in St Katherine Docks, a housing complex designed by the great Thomas Telford. This was a much more relaxed and historic looking place than the cold chromes, concretes, and green glass of Vauxhall. Visiting their Waitrose Supermarket afterwards only confirmed what we had merely suspected in Vauxhall's Tesco Express: Stu and I weren't staying in the posh part of London at all. No, we were staying in a place that had been through its artsy hipster phase, and was now entering its large scale gentrification phase.

A Fentiman's Rose Lemonade and a sit down at Mum and Dad's restored me to the human condition. But even after resting, there was just no way that Stuart and I could go anywhere to see anything. We needed to go home and zone right out. Which is what we're doing right now.

London definitely seduced me today with its architectural charms. Everything about this city feels accelerated and accelerating. I wonder how Surrey and Nottingham are going to feel after a week of this.Read more