Londinium

I haven't posted for a few days. Did anybody miss miss my interesting and sometimes humorous verbosity? I doubt it. But just in case you were wondering... I was arrested on Friday night following a brawl at the local Indian takeaway in which I hospitalized three young thugs who were repeatedly pummelling the friendly Bangladeshi proprietors with baseball bats when I entered the establishment. Only kidding. We were in London - our glorious capital city - mainly to visit our son Ian and his lovely girlfriend - Ruby.

Early on Sunday morning, as Shirley slept in our £103 hotel room (Grrrr!),  I walked down to Father Thames and snapped the picture at the top of this post. Can you tell what it is? I'll give you a clue. "Come on Oxford! Come on Cambridge!" If you have ever watched the University Boat Race on television, you'll be sure to have seen this building. Enlarge it and you'll even be able to read what it once was even though now it has been converted - like many such riverside buildings - into luxury apartments. Plenty of Humphreys and Lucindas in there. I say yaah!

Golden morning light illuminated the building beautifully at the beginning of a gorgeous day. Later, we collected Ian and Ruby and went to Greenwich to visit the National Maritime Museum, taking a stroll through Greenwich Park to the Royal Observatory. The view of London was splendid as you'll see from the bottom photograph. By Greenwich Market we ate pie and mash with peas and gravy, preferring to decline the jellied eels.

On Saturday night, we were riding on a red London bus to Notting Hill Gate. A bunch of lairy lads were on the top deck, laughing and talking loudly with occasional swear words thrown in for good measure. Their manner of speaking English is so different from what you might have heard from Londoners in the sixties. Back then it was the traditional Cockney brogue - like the Garnetts in "Till Death Us Do Part" but on Saturday night, it was all "innit" and "Knowwatahmean-man?" - Cockney twang had disappeared entirely from the lads' pronunciation and I wondered where they had learnt this new and to me jarring, modernistic, streetwise English. In school? A correspondence course? Naturally, I lurched to the back of the bus and urged them to speak properly but they seemed rather non-plussed.

In the foreground - Greenwich Park - still recovering from Olympic showjumping.