We awoke to another clear blue sunny day in London town. It was Sunday so that meant two things – more markets and Sunday brunch. We wandered out of the hotel with a rough plan that included a visit to Camden Town and a visit to Big Ben. Of course the plan immediately went off the rails when I took us off the main road to find the Petticoat Lane Market. Sounds interesting but really wasn’t lots of stalls selling poorly made rip offs in size 8-10 and guys selling fake designer handbags on sheets. The only problem was that you couldn’t seem to get out of it – through a maze of laneways, we eventually emerged a few blocks away from the train station. By now we were feeling hungry and the pub on the corner up ahead was about to open and serve an English breakfast. So like every other tourist in the vicinity we waited and then wandered in. We ordered at the bar but almost three quarters of an hour passed by, my tea and Dan’s coke long gone and we still hadn’t seen a sighting of our brekky. Not that they admitted it but I am pretty sure they forgot all about us. Another (shorter) wait and eventually it arrived – bacon, sausage, mushroom, tomato, beans, eggs and toast – a proper English breakfast. Tasty but not worth an hour’s wait.

From here we made our way to Camden town by tube. Camden Town station has got to be one of the busiest small stations in London. There are at least five station staffers just telling people not to stop in the station and assisting them to go through the turnstiles more quickly. People with prams, the elderly, the disabled and those with toddlers are directed to other nearby tube stations as the platform is a very long way down and there are only cramped stairs to get there. When you emerge from the station in the middle of an extraordinarily busy market, surrounded by markets selling everything from Goth outfits to tea towels with a London underground Map and when you turn to look away from the High Street you are faced with one of the more iconic of London’s pubs – The world’s End. I was eager to seek out gems I could take home and wear (like my space age Dr Martens ankle boots and not the purple goth skirt I purchased on my last visit that still hasn’t been turned into a party dress yet). But our first order of business was to find a model shop Dan had discovered on line.

It was the first model shop Dan had attempted to find since Stockholm. He had already missed out on the Porsche museum (which I was also looking forward to) and had chosen to spend today looking around London rather than go to Cambridge to look at the British Aerospace Museum. The only problem was when we arrived at the site of the store all we found was a notice letting us know it had closed down and that the nearest shop was a gazillion miles away. (Jump – Aztec Camera – a fabulous lounge cover of the mid 80s David Lee Roth monster. I love a good, well arranged cover and this one definitely fits the bill.)

As we wandered down the road, I spied a goth shop and of course just had to go in. And of course I found something I wanted to bring home – a winter coat – not the most practical addition to my now very heavy pack so I left it and decided to have a good think about it first. We wandered further down the road, weaving in and out of the hordes that seem to fill this road, day in day out no matter what day of the week. Eventually we arrived at Camden lock and its labyrinth of handcrafted goods and infamous multicultural food markets. There were plenty of things we might have tried if our big English breakfast wasn’t still being digested. Even Dan, who usually can’t resist trying market food, couldn’t fit anything in. As we rounded the corner, we found a stall of interesting T-shirts and found an even cooler Star Wars one than the one I had lost in Germany – it had a Star Wars walker being constructed out of tetris pieces. I bought it as a late Christmas present for Dan.

When we rounded the corner I spied the coolest shoe shop I had ever seen. Granted some of the creations were more Lady Gaga than Wall Street but I love a good original shoe. I spied several pairs that I could blow all my remaining holiday on but I had already decided to get the coat – there was only one left in my size – and sensibly decided that if I still wanted the shoes, I could do a mad dash to grab them on our return to London when I only had to carry my pack to the airport. My coat was our last stop in Camden but that of course meant I had to carry it around for the rest of the day – it had got too warm for a winter coat.

We headed back to the Thames to continue our sightseeing adventure. We walked along the foreshore to London Bridge and the houses of parliament. On my last trip here I had walked along the southern shore past the London Eye to get here. It turns out there was a Second World War Memorial of sorts that I missed last time. Lots of shots of Big Ben and Westminster Abbey later, including recreating my Big Ben London Eye selfie, we wandered into the park in the square these buildings faced. There are quite a few statues of famous leaders in the square which I hadn’t previously paid much attention to. The statues included Nelson Mandela, which was covered in flowers, becoming a makeshift shrine to probably one of the most important leaders of the last half century. Just like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid in South Africa is one of the biggest political events that occurred in my lifetime. When I was a teenager there was a constant protest outside the South African High Commission in my home town, a hugely controversial rogue cricket tour and a world wide movement to free Mandela from the prison where he had spent the majority of his adult life. It makes me feel old to think these events happened while I was a teenager but at the same time it reminds me there are some things that have happened in the last three decades to improve equality in the world. (Cherub Rock – The Smashing Pumpkins – one of my two fave Pumpkins tracks, the layers of sound in this track make me think of being rugged up on a cold winter’s night. Some tracks are summer songs and some winter – this is definitely, and appropriately, the latter.)

From musing over the enigmatic leader who lead revolutionary change in South Africa, we headed to the home of our own head of state, Buckingham Palace which reminded me of two things – 1) how we don’t have much to crow about seeing as equality for our own Indigenous peoples was only made law about 30 years before south Africa and that we as yet haven’t had an Indigenous Prime Minister 2) How even without a massive revolution, we are too gutless to change our own system of Government to reflect the independence of our nation. Having said all that, Buckingham Palace is worth a visit, if only to see the Beefeaters and Hyde Park.

As we left the Houses of Parliament, we pied a man and his son having their photo taken in what is probably one of only a few remaining red phone boxes in London. It is peculiar to think of such a mundane object as a phone box being the subject of a photo like this no matter how iconic the phone boxes are. Telstra phone boxes are also pretty rare these days. The one up the road from my old house where I phoned boyfriends from is long gone. Maybe a photo project is needed. We wandered just up the road until we spied the edge of St James Park., which to Dan’s great delight was filled with birds. Fortunately they were the type that didn’t put me in a fluster – geese, swans and ducks.

We wandered through the park, greeting our new winged friends until we arrived at Buckingham Palace. There was no changing of the guard, which I had just missed last time. While there were still plenty of visitors, this time I could actually get a look past the steel and gold laced gates into the palace forecourt, which allowed me a glimpse of the front door and the beefeater guarding it. The guard was quite a bit more portly than I was expecting – the kind you see in a comedy rather than a James Bond flick. And he was wearing a long grey coat instead of the traditional red coat. We wandered back along The Mall and then decided to head for Soho and Covent Garden, only a short stroll away through London’s real Monopoly Board past places such as Pall Mall, Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus. The first part of the journey took us past a series of very classy looking restaurants making us just a little bit hungry. Further on we passed the massive M&Ms shop which just made us even hungrier. There was even a Christmas Market (more of a fun fair) but we were a bit over Christmas Markets (unsurprising as it was now almost a week after Christmas. (Barflies at the Beach – Royal Crown Revue – one of a number of new style swing bands from the mid to late 90s. Even my fave cartoon, Daria had a swing themed episode.)

Wandering past the ticket booths in Soho and Covent Garden, I floated the idea of a show – the Book of Mormon and Spamalot were still running – but we were both pretty tired and Dan isn’t really that fond of shows. I suggested Pret a Manger as a good spot for a late lunch. And I inadvertently unleashed a new obsession. I’ve got to admit, I, like everyone else who has done London on the cheap, am a huge fan of Pret. Dan discovered their Salami and cheese baguette while I had a ham, pickle and cheese melt.

It was starting to get dark but we decided to take a walk around Soho through Chinatown (which, quite surprisingly, is much smaller than Sydney’s Chinatown). My trusty Lonely Planet Encounter guide (the new ones are called pocket guides) listed a store called Vintage Mag which sold, well, vintage magazines. It sounded right up our alley so we made a beeline for it. It was a treasure trove. Two floors of magazines from the last 80 years or so from Fashion mags to street press and every conceivable niche in between. There were also vintage movie posters, T-shirts, magnets of show posters and signs and all manner of other goodies. They were cleverly marketed too. In the basement they had boxes of magazines that corresponded to years of birth for important milestones. We spent the best part of an hour wandering around the shop looking at all the fab things we could buy. My Berlin poster had already taken a hammering so I thought better of buying a movie poster, despite finding plenty of contenders. I settled on a T-shirt featuring a 50s drag racing poster and a magnet of a kinks show poster. I thought about purchasing magazines but I already have a bigger collection of those than I really need. Yes it’s true – between Dan and I, we are only a few steps away from being hoarders.) After our immersion into the world of collectible magazines, we were pretty tired so we headed back to the hotel to chill out, watching a marathon of specials about the making of Dr Who.

Earlier in the day, I had suggested going to a local pub for Sunday Roast, as it was indeed Sunday. It’s one if the things I really enjoyed last time I came here – the relaxed Sunday Roast in the pub and I don’t know why you don’t see it more here during winter. Unfortunately, on this occasion it wasn’t the wisest choice. Our hope was that the pub almost next to the hotel, of which I had read a number of stellar reviews, would be open for dinner. It wasn’t. We vowed not to go back to the place where we had breakfast that forgot us so we found another pub along the way. It started off badly – when we went to the bar to order, despite the fact we could see plenty of other people eating meals in the pub, they told us we’d have to go to the dining room upstairs, which we did. We ordered and then a couple of beers later we still hadn’t gotten our meals. We even asked about it and still nothing. Almost an hour after we ordered, with me falling asleep on the table, someone finally came and admitted they had forgotten us. It was then that I realised this pub was run by the same company that owned the one that forgot us at breakfast. There really is something to be said for owner operated businesses, even franchises in the hospitality industry. Eventually our meals arrived and while the Yorkshire pudding was fabulous, the rest of the meal wasn’t worth an hour’s wait. While I had originally intended a bit of a wander after dinner or to chill in the pub, I was so hungry by the time dinner arrived that it had taken every last bit of energy so we just headed home to bed and an early start to pick up our hire car. (Slow Dog – Belly – this song like much of Belly’s catalogue reminds me of the Ainslie share house I was living in when they appeared on the scene. It had been a long time since I had listened to new music on the radio and it was this (not Nirvana) that kicked me into the 90s).

Christmas themed activities – 24 War museums and model shops – 3 Design experiences – 2