But we have had some nice days out in between. Yesterday, we went to look at paintings at the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. I stayed up really really late Sunday night sending my bosses lots of work and the time difference means I knew I'd have the morning off, at least, and could extend it to most of the day and work in the evening. Freelance has its benefits!
It took us ages to get there in the first place. Started off dragging Young Man out of bed (the teens have definitely hit). Actually, I think I started off just finishing up Sunday night's work and getting all the pieces submitted. That's right. I woke at 4 a.m. and finished at 9. (and you wonder why my memory's bad! Now you see why I'm so attracted to wwoofing. How much lovelier to wake up at 7 or 8 and walk out of the caravan and weed the pumpkin patch or plant potatoes as the work for the day, instead of staring at the computer! But at least I am doing enjoyable math work, albeit long hours on the computer, I'll be grateful in 60 days from invoice when bank account rises.)
After we left the house, we took Wallaby #55 (Yarrow calls the red double-decker busses wallabies, I'm not sure why but we like it so....) down to Tottenham Court Road, where we intended to head downwards to the National Gallery. Had to stop off in the Tube station to top up the Oyster card travel passes first.
(USEFUL note here: if you are coming to London, you must get an Oyster card to travel on the transit. It costs 5 pounds and then you top it up at machines. When you leave, you can get the 5 pounds plus whatever balance you have, back. The only other way to get on a bus in London is to fast-talk and show your handful of money and explain you just didn't know about the Oyster card deal and the bus driver is like how did you get here so far away from where you're staying and then you say that you walked and your feet hurt and then you find out that London wallaby drivers tend towards being very nice. Yesterday, we saw the Wallaby55 that we needed and started running for it and he waited for us to get down the block. Very kind.)
(Other, probably irrelevant to everyone else note: my feet hurt so much with plantar fasciatis that I fantasize almost every day when we are coming home, and when I am waking up, about crutches. When get to next country work posting, going to recommence weight loss schemes. Likely the caffeine I'm guzzling to facilitate the computer work is also not helping the plantar fash. Computer work is just way too hard on my body these days.)
Then I saw there was a Car Phone Warehouse and Boy has been looking for phone case for his iPod 6, a hard to get item, and so we asked in there and then they sent us up the street to Maplin electronics (they didn't have it, and they tried to send us even further up the street to PC World, but we didn't bite this time). Yarrow had very excitedly gone to the Apple store in Covent Garden, which is the architecturally most beautiful Apple store I've ever seen, but they didn't carry iPod cases either, which made him really mad.
Anyway, I didn't mind walking up the street. There were interesting buildings and businesses and people along the way, including some guy who was whistling then saw me look so whistled even more impressively and then attempted some flirty conversation. That was nice if blessedly brief, one of those street-side conversations. It is very easy to talk to strangers in London. I love that about London.
And we saw this thing too, which someone told us (who knows if it's true) when we asked her that it was a BT (British Telecom) tower.
Eventually we got ourselves turned south again and got past Chinatown (where boy was highly motivated to go for steam buns, but there was a horrible stink as we were going past and so we carried on south) and to a row of used bookshops. We bought two in the third shop, unenthusiastically, as they're the kind of literature that second-hand book owners seem to find virtuous -- it has been sooo hard finding just nice books to read, the kind people read in North America, you know. Fun, uplifting, delicious books. So we bought the most likely subjects we could find but our despair over lack of delicious books was not lifted. We've been starved but I really really want boy to stop reading on his phone. Phone reading is not a healthy habit I want him addicted to this young. Back to paper, I've been saying. And saying. And saying. But it's been so hard to find paper! Our facebook friend Christine found us some bookshops and I wanted to go Sunday but I was trying to work, and Yarrow wasn't supportive of getting out of house and we didn't. Anyway we bought those two.
... but further down the street after lunch we discovered the Charing Cross Library, and yes they DID have a book sale and guess what? 3 pounds 80 filled two bags with much better books than we've seen in 6 months. HURRAY! Even as I am typing this blog I am procrastinating ADD-like with reading the delicious "Call Me Sister" by Jane Yeadon. Subtitle, District Nursing Tales from the Swinging Sixties. After our lunch we took those two big bags of books down to the very pleasing art-walled espresso bar with comfy couches in the basement of the National Gallery and marvelled at our loot. I read the first pages of several of them and loved them all. One of them, you can tell the author is going to have a sense of humour as the ship that they are on is called Fishhook. This book I am reading now, I read Yarrow the whole first page, as it's that funny. Here. I'll read it to you too.
"Call Me Sister" by Jane Yeadon
"It was a bad start to a Monday. The teaspoon count hadn't balanced and a bacon rasher had gone AWOL. <props for mentioning bacon -- bacon enhances everything, even books> Inverness's Raigmore Hospital could be heading for meltdown. With a fresh outbreak of nastiness in my female medical ward and its Sister Gall providing it, my dream of leaving hospital work for district nursing had never looked more attractive. After all, I was a qualified general nurse and midwife; I'd had six months' experience working in a male surgical ward and was now completing another half-year in this one. But even if that was a fair amount of training, I'd yet to come across treatment for a pain in the neck."
I also pegged that cafe as a good one because the barista was speaking rapidly to her boyfriend (or a flirt-worthy male of some description) when we had first arrived there before lunch. I'm telling you, having Italians making your coffee is a good thing and London is so multicultural that it is fairly easy to walk past Italian-named cafes with Asian or white baristas, and find yourself an actual Italian being passionate about coffee. In our neighbourhood there is a particularly delightful guy from Napoli who has a little hole in the wall. He makes pizza and pastries in his own kitchen and bought himself an espresso machine and is friendly and complimentary and sweet.
As soon as Yarrow and I first drove from France (which just doesn't have good coffee, usually) to Italy in 2014, the coffeeshop signs started appearing. Italians don't expect you to go through your day without some good proper coffee. Every gas station and even some goldsmiths have an espresso machine and someone with passion and skill to run it properly. Trust me, get your coffee made by an Italian whenever you can. :)
Anyway, I had started writing this post to tell you about two delightful conversations in my day yesterday. The first was at lunch. Yarrow was pushing for Chinatown, and had recently started asking for an all-you-can-eat buffet. So we took a break from looking at paintings and went to find the teenage boy some food. We turned into the first BUFFET sign we say (I didn't realize there were several more around the corner, but never mind).
It was a small little affair, not at all fancy, with cheap tables and chairs jammed in cheek-by-jowl and full of customers. We lucked out! There was a table. There was an older man sitting beside us who looked like he probably lived on the street. Baseball hat and sweat pants and all that. He suggested switching tables so we'd be against the wall and he'd be in the middle so it was easier for him to wedge in and out of it, and I was amenable. I'd been actually wanting that table by the wall as it was nicer, to me, to be out of the flow of people. Anyway I said something friendly or he did and soon we were chatting away.
He was far from a bag man -- he was in London to attend a property auction as he's thinking of adding another one to the 5 he already owns. He pops back and forth to India quite often. We discussed religion (he had a wonderful e-mail from a friend... I'll have to ask him for it and share it with you) and travel and London and schooling and mantras -- at one point he sang a very short om but it was so powerful it echoed like medicine all through my body -- very thrilling.
Tee hee, and at one point he asked if Yarrow spoke English, which tells you how much the teenager talks these days. So then Yarrow was drawn into the conversation.
Anyway even though we'd picked the cheapest buffet and saw there were rather tastier looking ones around the corner, Yarrow and I both agreed we were so happy that we had that conversation with that guy. My heart feels warm and happy and light just thinking about it. He was a lovely warm person.
The second thrilling London conversation of the day was sititng looking at Van Gogh's sunflowers (feet in pain for a few hours now, and not wanting to leave the National Gallery just yet, and possibly inspired by "teenager, possibly bored, a still life"
we had moved on to something lots of people seem to do there. Just sit down and soak it all up. Since boy had quickly moved on to sitting and being bored, it was easy to join in (I banned using the phone for reading, but he started using it to take photos, one of which was this:
Which is a kind of nice arrangement of colours!
So anyway, I was sitting in the room with the Van Gogh stuff, and the man on the bench beside me was looking at Sunflowers and told me how his mother really loved that one and once he had brought her (from Brazil) to see it. He was an engineer and it turned out that he and I had been at Waterloo University in Canada in the same semester (I was only there one semester, on exchange and en route to second semester in Brisbane Australia).
I should mention too, though out of order, that I have had much solace from conversations with Joe, who was taking a stint working at the laundry while the regular woman was away. (We go over there if we need to use the dryer, which is how I met him. Since I'm still trying to kill the odd French flea that pops up, sometimes I go there to dry everything again). Joe's British but mostly lived in Australia but he's not going back there. Anyway, that's been nice. And he was the first conversation this morning, and this is the last sentence of this blog.
