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  • Day 33

    The lure of London

    September 28, 2022 in England ⋅ ⛅ 11 °C

    I don't have to ask if I'll ever come back to London again because I've already gone to London twice. I'm here now.

    The fabled addictive quality of London is no fable at all. As soon as I got the chance, I came straight back. Stuart and I sat in The Drayton's Arms pub tonight enjoying our beer and feeling absolutely at home.

    But it has been a long hard day getting here. I'm really glad we didn't try to go from Cornwall to London on the day of our flight. We would have been shattered before even getting on the plane.

    We got up at 6.30 and looked at the sun rising over Bristol and Castle Park. Bristol is such a hilly place and so full of terraces and tenements, it had a weird echo of San Francisco about it. We immediately set about packing up our whole existence into our collection of bags, tidy organs in our tidy luggage body. Everything for the next 8 hours was pure logistics and plans. We were stalled by the need to settle a bill for some furniture back home, and stalled again by a fire on the M4, but otherwise it was a continuous run from Bristol to Euston Station.

    We had our first London Black Cab from Euston Station to our hotel, The Prime. This was a really lovely tour experience in many ways, as we both relaxed (He the driver, I the navigator), and looked out the window at Hyde Park, at Royal Albert Hall, at Madame Tussauds.

    The Prime London is a converted Georgian Terrace, very tidy and tight, small and spare, but absolutely canny. The paint job is immaculate, the marble is new, everything feels renovated and trustworthy. The concierge lady is a laugh a minute. ("The password is Welcome To Prime, not Welcome To Crime!" and "Did you find a pharmacy? I think the medicine you need is a bottle of Jack Daniels!") The whole place is disgustingly instagrammable, and I am going to instagram the shit out of it, no doubt.

    We have not discussed what we will do in London. I guess the London Eye is a possibility again. So is the Natural History Museum.

    I am not sure if I need to get a new suitcase so I can fly without anxiety. I'll think about that tomorrow when I'm stronger.
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