I want to wish all my readers the very happiest of Christmases! I've had a smashing one here in London.
When I woke up Father Christmas had come during the night! (How did he know I was here?) I got loads of brilliant stuff, like these books on the London Underground!
Oooh, more Underground stuff. Thanks, FC...I really wanted this book and CD!
And the new Goon Show and Just a Minute CDs, and a CD about my favourite Radio 1 disk jockey!
The new Everyman P. G. Wodehouse books! I think Father Christmas has been looking at my Amazon.co.uk wish list!
Bags of Thornton's toffee, the best toffee in the world! One regular and one banana flavour. I don't know which one to try first!
And a Cadbury Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut bar as big as I am! I hope Father Christmas bought me a toothbrush as well.
And Mrs. Weasley made me a new sweater.
After gifts we went out for a morning walk through lovely wild Holland Park...
...and then through the poshest districts of Kensington. Happy Christmas, posh people!
When we got back to the hotel I changed into my good clothes to go down to the restaurant for Christmas luncheon.
Free drinks! I thought this was orange juice but it is alcoholic. Hic!
There were Christmas crackers on every table! I like 'em but I have trouble pulling them open.
We also each got a free festive holiday hat. Mine is kinda big.
Yummy hearty tomato and pepper soup for starters.
Roast turkey with all the trimmings! I did not care for the Brussels sprouts but I thought the bacon-wrapped sausages were v. good.
The whole meal was topped off with a traditional Christmas pudding, plus tiny mince pies just my size!
In summary: it was our best ever Christmas. I hope you all have had as wonderful a holiday as I have. Now I'm off to watch the Doctor Who Christmas special!
Oh, and if you want to see more of my photos, here's a special Chrimble prezzie for you: an index to my holiday snaps so far:
- Day 1: Pizza Express and Kensington High Street
- Day 2: Bloomsbury, Russell Square, Leicester Square, Covent Garden
- Day 3: St Albans
- Day 4: Chelsea and Spitalfields
- Day 5: Christmas presents, Holland Park, Kensington and Christmas luncheon
Plus three specialty albums:
It's Christmas Eve and Marshall and I are so excited we will hardly be able to sleep! Why? I'm telling you why! Father Christmas is coming to London Town!
You all know how much I love the Underground, but there are some places the Underground won't take you. One of them is the far side of Chelsea, at the bottom end of the King's Road, and that's the perfect place to start today. No worries, I'll simply take a bus. I used to find the bus routes confusing and intimidating (at least in comparison to the Underground), but a few years ago Transport for London initiated a radical redesign of bus maps and signage at major stops that's made it exceptionally easy to find out where you can catch the exact bus you need, what route it will take, and where you need to get off. They did this by designing bus maps that are essentially overground versions of Harry Beck's famous and much-copied Underground map—using clear and comprehensive graphic lines and ticks to explain the routes and bus stops. It takes me only a moment to realize I want is the number 49 bus, that it stops at bus stop "A" on the High Street, that it'll be along in three or so minutes, and all is good and well in the world. Three and a half minutes later, I hop on a number 49 bus, wave my Oystercard over the touchpad and take my seat in the upper level, as the bus zips along through the streets, carrying me merrily along with it. I very much miss the old-fashioned conductor-manned Routemaster buses, but I'll actually settle for knowing where I'm going so much more clearly than I ever did before on a bus.
The far end of Chelsea is a posh, upscale residental area. Even on the King's Road past Sidney Street the shops are shuttered for the holiday and there's little to no motor or foot traffic. It's very quiet here; I take my headphones off for a while and enjoy the silence punctuated by my hoofbeats on the pavement. I swerve down side streets and start to explore. There are gorgeous old houses here that I'd love to live in, if only I could save that many pence. A lot of the doors are decorated with beautiful Christmas wreaths and I start taking photos of them, hoping no one will burst out of their house and yell at me. (They don't.) Many of the buildings have beautiful old-style street signs still mounted on them, and there are plenty of the famous historical 
Down the Embankment then, and up and across the King's Road (it's getting busier now the closer I get back towards Sloane Square Tube Station) and I cross into one of my favorite residential areas just north of the King's Road: an area where many of the houses are painted in brilliant, cheerful pastel or bright shades, in many cases alternating like crayons down a single street. My very favorite is No. 23 Godfrey Street: now that's where I want to live. It's a brilliant shade of blue, sitting at the bottom of a slight slope leading down from King's Road, quiet and peaceful neighborhood only a few steps away from the bustle and fun of Chelsea. I consider knocking on the door and asking if they will let me live there, but then I see some other interesting houses and stroll away to explore further.
Eventually my hoofbeats take me to Sloane Square Tube Station and I hop on board the Sunday-service Circle Line to take me to a station I can't actually remember having gotten off at: Liverpool Street. It's also a British Rail main line station and the place is filled with holiday travellers. I prefer the old-style station style of Paddington, but Liverpool Street has done a nice job of modernizing and the designers have kept the original arching iron girder roof intact above. A handful of steps away is 
This is a repost of something I wrote one year ago today. It's still pertinent—sadly—so here it is again.
How to answer that question? At least until the departure of Shane MacGowan, there wasn't to my ears a bad Pogues album. But The Keeper's spot on: Rum, Sodomy and the Lash is one of the great Pogues albums—loud, raucous, Irish punk from smack-dab in the middle of the eighties: back in the heyday of the new British invasion it was the Pogues who showed us Americans that there was more to music of the day from the British Isles than Spandau Balley and Culture Club. It contains the sublime "I'm a Man You Don't Meet Every Day" with Sinéad O'Connor (a song John has said he wants played at his funeral, which better not happen for a long, long time!), the heartbreaking but rollicking "The Sick Bed of Cuchulain," the single best cover of "Waltzing Matilda" by non-Australians (and better than most of those), and another brilliant cover, this time of one of the finest angry city songs of all time, "Dirty Old Town," originally written by folk singer Ewan MacColl (yes, Kirsty's dad) in the immediate post-War depression of industrial Britain's northern towns.
"Lullabye of London" from If I Should Fall from Grace with God; "Misty Morning, Albert Bridge," "White City," and "London You're a Lady," from Peace and Love; "London Girl" from Poguetry in Motion, "Dark Streets of London" and "Transmetropolitan" (the greatest song ever about hopping on the Underground to terrorize the inhabitants of each borough of London in turn) from Red Roses for Me...all beautiful, haunting songs that only Shane MacGowan's gravelly, beer-soaked voice could do true justice to, but none come as close for me to capturing the essence of London's beauty, romance, heartbreak, passion and mystery as "Rainy Night in Soho" from their 1986 EP Poguetry in Motion:
Our guide for the day was the cheery and knowledgeable Hillary, her professional tour guide blue-badge proudly displayed, and she guided us into the town with periodic pauses to tell the history and evolution of the town. As I'd never even heard of St Albans before it was all fascinating new info to me, including the fact that St Albans was once the number three Roman city in Britain (known then as Verulamium). I'm a big fan of all things historically Roman, especially the Lindsey Davis mysteries featuring Marcus Didius Falco, the Asterix comics, and of course all those gladiator movies, so this was a great delight to me. The town looked incredibly sleepy, however, as we wandered in from the station. Where was everyone? Had we stumbled upon a deserted ghost town? Where oh where were the denizens of St Albans?
Every man jack of 'em was at the St Albans' market, of course! It stretched on for street after street after street—crafts and food and gifts and books and toys and drinks and clothing and jewelry and more of everything else every step you took! Holy (again) cow! I'm not certain if it's the biggest street market I've ever seen, but it certainly was one of the longest. Everyone was out Christmas and holiday shopping, and our group slid our way through the crowds. Hilary warned us "Don't start shopping now!...we'll never find you again!" (She did tell us there would be plenty of time to shop at our leisure after the afternoon portion of the tour.) Reluctantly I tore myself away from a booth featuring some football club scarves (including the team I back, Chelsea...Blues forever!) and trotted along to follow the rest of the tour.
St Albans is crowned by a cathedral on a hill, which made it beginning in medieval days a leading destination for pilgrims and because of its proximity to London, a major stop-over location for travelers of all kinds, both religious and secular, heading in both directions. (Even today it's mostly a commuter town; mainly populated by people who work in London and commute in on rail. Oh, so it's the Croton of Hertfordshire, then!) It was for many centuries the first overnight coach stop to and from London, which explains why in those days, Hilary explained, seventy-two coaches a day passed through St Albans! All those coaches need lots of coaching inns, and she guided us down a picturesque and gently sloping road leading in/out of town and pointed out all the sites of many, many inns: they're evident by their arched entrances leading to the back or inside lots. (Now serving as garage access for everyone's Austin Minis.) Many of those inns are still extant today as pubs; I counted more pubs in a quarter mile than most everyplace else in the British Isles I've been to (Well, except for some sections of Dublin).
We come to the bottom of the sloping hill and make a gentle curve back towards town to discover a tiny stream that was once a river so large Roman ships came up it from the Thames. I look over the bridge and find it hard to believe; it's barely the size of Mud Creek way back in Clay, New York. Either there's been some serious setback to the size of the river or these were mighty tiny Romans, perhaps along the size of Asterix. These Romans are not only crazy, they're absolutely microscopic! Hilary assures me the river was much, much wider and deeper in those days, and walks us all down to the reason it's so much smaller now: a peaceful long artificial lake built by the unemployed marchers from Jarrow to London protesting the loss of their jobs in the North, but who stayed behind to create the lake on their way to London—sort of a British version of a WPA project. That's why there's still so many families in St Albans who can trace their heritage to a Geordie North: they are from the Jarrow men who stayed behind because they were offered work, and never left St Albans.
We hike back up the gently sloping hill and St Albans cathedral comes into view, a compact but grand sprawling medieval cathedral (with some curious but not-offensive Victorian additions designed by the man who engineered the Big Ben Bells, Hilary tells us), and the sight of the brick cathedral tower instantly turns a little lightbulb on over my head. "That solves the Mystery of the Missing Roman Brick!" I declare to Peter, and sure enough, Hilary confirms that's what happened to the Roman city and wall: St Albans is built on poor rock for mining or construction, so the building of the cathedral used the extra material at hand, carted up the hill with wheelbarrows, wagons, and no doubt a good amount of ironic contemplation that materials used by pagan Romans was to now be used to build a cathedral to the Christian God.
It was getting on to near-dusk by the time the tour ended, so I said my goodbyes and made my way back into town to check out some shops and the market, which was winding down but still as busy as before. I was only able to see a fraction of it before my hooves got so weary I had to hop on a bus back to the train station to return to London, but I was utterly impressed by not only the high Christmas spirits of everyone but the range and variety of gifts, food, clothing, jewelry and crafts at the market. You see a street fair in Manhattan and it's the same as every other street fair: the funnel cakes and the guy selling the big plastic bags full of tube socks. I didn't see a single tube sock, but I saw lots of cool stuff, and even though I didn't buy anything, looking was as fun as buying.
Instead of a chopper, however, what you were likely to get in your head was the BBC Morning News, because "Oranges and Lemons" was the opening signature tune of the BBC Light Programme, the BBC radio network that spotlighted light music, variety comedy and dramatized plays. If you're a fan of The Goon Show like me, you'll remember that Wallace Greenslade often began the show with the announcement "This is the BBC Light Programme." (depending on the transcribed version of the episode). The song didn't spring full-fledged at the creation of the Light Programme following WWII, of course: it's a traditional song from possibly as far back as the seventeenth century. Its lyrics suggest it has origins as a nursery rhyme (with a macabre ending similar to "Ring Around the Rosy."
But what's all that got to do with London, and what are all those bells the lyrics are talking about? Each of the lines refers to a specific church of its time in the City of London proper, and what the bells are "saying" is supposed to reflect in cadence and rhythm what their church bells sounded like when rung. Truth? Fantasy? Great urban legend? I don't know much more, but I do know this: the song has become so identified with London itself that now the bells of St. Clement Church in Eastcheap (pictured here) actually do play the tune of the entire song. I bet the other churches are green with jealousy.
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