Today it snowed in London...

...and The Daily Mash in it's own inimitable style reported on the phenomenon:
(BTW - Carlisle is a city in England's frozen North, although this year that should be soggy North)

London Sacrifices Virgins after Centimetre of Snow

The soft South is renowned for coming to a halt as soon as a snowflake hits the ground

I could show you my favourite obsession... I've *NOT* been making a man with blond hair and a tan...

... I've been hatching scooters and hoofers!

I have a weakness for computer games. I can't work controllers and joysticks, I'm too tight for a Wii, (sounds like a continence problem) and I'm not fast enough for shoot-em-ups. However, I have blown hours on various types of solitaire (Pretty Good Solitaire www.goodsol.com 500 types of solitaire and the best) and spent ages playing match 3 games (diamond mine, jewel quest, fishdom) hidden object games and found my personal heaven in Big Fish Games. The only site that (almost) persuaded a miser like me to consider a subscription!

But now Big Fish have introduced a game that has ensured that my every free moment is spent in front of my computer and whenever I am away from it (to work, sleep, etc) I am thinking about it!

Faunasphere!

Faunasphere is a game designed for sad old ladies like me, according to the young guns who write reviews of those expensive console games everyone is being persuaded to fork out for at this time of year. But even those who've reviewed it are positive about it. It is a multi player web based game where the idea is to hatch an animal - a scooter(tortoise), hoofer(horse) or sniffer(dog) send it out into the world to grow, find food, fight pollution, and build a comfortable private world to live in. All the while if you like, you can interact with other players, make friends, and work together.

It has elements that will please various types of player, if you like to blast things the fauna have torches strapped to their back, or round their neck, that shoot out lightning and blast away pollution blocks, and some of those pollution blocks fight back! There are grades of pollution from inert blocks that just go when you shoot them, to nasties that fart on you when you try to kill, them via vileys that shield themsselves so they can overcome you with their fumes, up to the pollution monster itself that doesn't just fart! But if you don't have any aggression to work off you can pootle around the sphere, meeting up with other players, chatting, asking for and giving game tips, digging for treasure, hunting it from specific locations, accepting goals and carrying out specific tasks. If you prefer to use your design and homemaking skills you can design a private paradise for your Fauna to live in. If you are interested in genetic manipulation and breeding for specific traits you can breed your fauna through the generations to design for particular species, colours even eye and tail types. there are currently 12 species of fauna that can be bred from the original 3, and who knows there may even be more! I converted one of my hoofers to a squeaker (lemming) and one of my squeaker eggs hatched into a frog!

As a game it sucks you in, "I'll just play for a few more minutes, till I find this item, till I increase my level, till I see what's around this corner...

It's certainly better at "relieving my t-tension" than Rocky!

Fun in the garden

I have ordered myself some fruit trees and am ridiculously excited about them. I'm mad I know - anyone who believes 10% of what they say in a newspaper advert is being over optimistic, but I can't help it. When an envelope arrives with 5 fruit seeds instead of the five foot trees I'm expecting my bubble will burst but until then...

It's late October now, the clocks have changed and it gets dark at about 4:30, it's certainly pitch dark when I get home from work, so the only time I have to garden is at the weekend, unless I invest in some floodlighting

So if I want to clear a bit of the wilderness to receive these trees I have to do it this weekend hail, rain or shine and rain is what we've been promised. This morning I saw a gap in the clouds and decided to get cracking on the weeds, maybe clear a couple of feet of ground. So out I went and I actually found the weeds were coming up quite easily. The ground was quite loose and the fork was able to scoop the greenery off the top. For some reason the fork wouldn't go very deep into the ground though...

When I started to pay attention to what I was doing I realised the soil was very sandy here - and the barrier was a sheet of plastic (2 actually) I had discovered a sandpit! Complete with little plastic toys, a plastic rake and at least one melamine plate that didn't enjoy being buried for several years and had degraded into bits. My heart sank.

I would have to find the edges of the plastic layer, remove all the sand, pull out the plastic layer then dig up the base, and mix the sand back in (Is that a good idea for my trees?)

It took me 3 half hour sessions, the first to clear the weeds and assess the extent of the sandpit, the second to clear away about a third of the sand and start pulling up the plastic. At this point I took a photo break


The third was the most satisfactory. I focussed on shovelling sand and chucking it in a pile. On reflection it would have been wiser not to build the mountain on the edge of the plastic liner. I had to undermine my mountain to get the last of it out, but get it out I did. So now I have a hole, a sandy hill and no energy at all!


Now I just have to dig it all over and sit back and watch the weeds take over again

Your Teeth Are Fine But Your Gums Will Have To Come Out

I am a complete coward when it comes to dentists. I know it's irrational and they are gentle creatures who don't inflict pain without fully anaesthetising you first, but the thought of visiting one fills me with terror. This has had an adverse impact on my mouth as you can imagine ;)

A further complication is that the good old NHS has done something really weird with dentists contracts over the past 10 years or so with the result that NHS dentists are now as rare as hens' teeth and for some reason they are dead keen to remove you from their lists. There must be some benefit to them in being a rare species, maybe they get funding from the world wildlife fund or something.

Anyway, the key point being I had a right dose of toothache last weekend and on Monday discovered I had been de-registered by my dentist. The combination of pain, fear and having the means to end the pain taken away from me increased my stress levels dramatically. There followed a bit of slapstick concerning a single vacancy on my own dentist's list, an elderly couple waving a �20 deposit and a rush to the counter to try to secure the magic place on my behalf. They failed. I was out in the cold with panic gripping my heart.

Fortunately our Health Board has a fallback in place. You phone a number and tell the nice girl on the end the nature of your emergency and she arranges an emergency appointment for you with distressing speed. So by lunchtime on Monday I was heading off to a health centre in Galashiels, quivering in my boots and with no time to head to my doctor to try to extract a couple of tranqillisers from them. (I use them once every couple of years, only for dentists visits why are my doctors so reluctant to prescribe them?)

Anyway, the upshot of all this was I saw a nice young dentist (probably just out of college - why doesn't he have a proper practice? Don't think things like that Heather, he has the power of pain over you) who looked in my mouth very gently and pronounced the tooth is fine, there was nothing to be done. Relief? Horror? So what about this pain then? The problem is my bone is receding, and the tooth is coming loose, the roots are exposed and if anything touches the root it hurts. He packed a bit of filling around it but implied it was like putting a plaster on a gaping wound. I have to be careful with it and watch for food getting caught under there and it getting infected. If an abcess develops they will treat it and remove the tooth. But for now I can take paracetamol and wait for it to go away.

So I have been given official confirmation that my usual practice of ignoring things and hoping they go away is the correct action in this case. I'm surprised, every other episode of toothache I've had has been pain that escalates dramatically until a dentist makes it go away. Although this tooth did hurt during the summer and it did go away again, and currently it has reduced to a slight ache so here's hoping...

New Toy - Peg Loom

This week I got a new toy - a peg loom. I think you must call it something else in the USA because the only sites I've seen with a peg loom like this are British. It is a strip of wood with holes in it, into which sit a number of pegs. The pegs are weaving sticks, with holes at the end, a bit like blunt wooden needles.



You warp it up by threading the warp yarn through the holes at the end of the pegs and then standing the pegs up in the loom. My loom has a warp anchor bar to keep the warp yarn untangled, I threaded the pairs of threads through the bar and tied it off.



You weave your weft yarn (or rags or even raw fleece!) in and out the pegs until you have filled the pegs.



Then you lift out the pegs (a few at a time) and slide the fabric down the pegs onto the warp threads.



Then keep going, tie off the warp threads when you're all done and Voila!



Too small to be a blanket and too thick to be a table mat! Beautifully soft though and not bad for a first attempt. Now what can I turn it into?

Well I Found It Funny

More to be found here at xkcd.com

Health warning:
Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).

- and they're right about the maths!

Tesco Sucks

Tesco is a UK supermarket, and I believe is the third largest supermarket in the world, it's certainly the largest in the UK, has a presence absolutely everywhere and is popularly believed to be almost single handedly responsible for the decline of high streets throughout the UK. They certainly make plenty money. A large company like this is often a target for dissatisfied members of the public.

A protest sign on Blaikie's Hill, Galashiels
© Copyright Walter Baxter and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

The farmer who erected this Tesco Sucks sign put it up because Tesco pulled down a beautiful 19th century red sandstone building to build their hideous excrescence and despite it being part of their planning permission that they rebuild it, after over 2 years of trading they haven't shown any sign of replacing it. He says they have ruined his view of the town and when you look below - you can see his point.

Galashiels Town Centre Redevelopment
© Copyright Walter Baxter and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

The white splodge centre right is a massive three storey white block and it looks just as obtrusive close up. The slightly lower white splodge at the bottom left is another supermarket that opened at the same time as Tesco but it is an unashamed white shed, single storey and doesn't pretend to be anything else than a white shed, and it was built on the site of a former railway station so is no real loss. (If anyone's interested the long building 2/3 of the way up the right of the picture is my old school and until Gala became supermarket central I think it was the biggest building in Gala.) So that's why Tom Douglas thinks Tesco Sucks - but why do I agree with him?

My husband recently had a major operation and has been left rather weak, and lacking in the energy to trochle all the way around a huge supermarket. Today we decided to visit Tesco for a change, and I tried to get a key for a scooter.... After waiting at the customer service desk for the lone woman to deal with 2 customer complaints I asked for a key for a scooter, she grabbed one, glanced around and collared a security guard some way away, he said he would help once he had finished fiddling with something at his desk.... after a short period steam started coming out my ears and I grabbed my husband and plonked him on a chair in a display of patio furniture thinking to myself "these bloody scooters are for people who aren't able to stand around waiting for your convenience!" but being stoic and British I bit my tongue for a minute or two. Next thing I saw Mr Security Guard helping some other person with something or other, I watched in horror as he made a phone call and chatted away to the customer, then once he had finished with the call I walked up to him and said incredulously "Shall I take the key and just get it myself?" he said to me nicely "Oh that would be really helpful" and I stormed up the shop thinking "I'm the customer, you're supposed to be the helpful one!" Being such a disabled friendly store, Tesco keeps its scooters at the other end of the shop from the disabled lifts, and entrance. (I thought the days of hiding disabled people away were over but obviously not in Tesco-land) Having reached the 3 scooters I picked one, switched it on and nothing happened, I grabbed another tried it but it was obviously needing charged, I tried the third one thinking I was losing my mind and again not a sausage. I made my way back to the customer service desk, and told the girl I couldn't get it to work. She looked around in an anguished way but Mr Security Guard was deep in conversation with his customer who by this time was obviously his pal because they were chatting away like old buddies. He was far too busy blethering to help. She asked another 4 members of staff but none knew how to work the scooters although one did say she would come and try, having had comprehensive instructions from Ms Customer Services. Put the key in, turn it and press the lever. I told Ms Checkout Girl I had already tried that. The two of us spent several minutes fiddling about with the scooters and guess what? Nothing worked. Then another checkout operator who also had no idea how to work it came over and couldn't get any of them to go. By this time I noticed the time and realised my husband had been sitting like a lemon in the patio furniture display for over 15 minutes and my blood pressure was going through the roof. I stomped off in disgust leaving the girls to it and would like to say that I left the shop without buying anything but we had come for something that couldn't be got anywhere else. We did however, for the first time in recorded history buy only the items we came for and made not a single impulse purchase. I think if I had followed my impulses at the time I would have left the shop on a policeman's arm, not my husbands!

So yes, I fully agree with Tom Douglas, more power to your elbow Tom - Tesco definitely Sucks, and so does Scottish Borders Council for trying to get you to take your Tesco Sucks sign down.

Neighbours

...everybody needs good neighbours!!!

But do your neighbours lean over the wall and nibble on your roses?

Here he is wandering over for a snack -




and with a few members of his harem

BBC Books people lie about having read

The BBC figures most people will have on average read about 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
Copy and paste into notes. Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read. Tally your total below. Movies don't count!

This should be interesting....

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X .....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible ^ .............well I've worked my way through the New Testament, so half a x
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ..............uuurgh no!!!
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X (poor tess)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X .......... hated the first couple of chapters then Loved it!
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare .........come onnnn!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks .......... no but Charlotte Gray was DIRE!
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger ....... tried twice - never got past the first page.
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot X
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (see 10)
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X (Capitalist tosh!)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X (Dear God yes - I hate Dickens for a reason you know)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X (all of em even Sanditon and the Watsons!)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X (Must Read)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy X
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons X
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon X (Utter Utter Sh*te)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (Is this the druggy one that I fought my way through? nope that was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (Tried several times aaargh!)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (Life's too short - dried up before anything happened)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom X (see 56)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X (Compulsory in the 70s)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute X
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X (at school so it must count)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Tally: 47 and a half

Mama

This is a fun facebook game that just uses a music player on random or shuffle to answer a set of questions:

1, 2 step Share

Today at 18:53

1. Put your iTunes, winamp, mp3-player etc. on shuffle
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer
3. You must write down the name of the song no matter how silly it sounds!
4. Put any comments in brackets after the song name
5. Tag at least 10 friends
6. Anyone tagged has to do the same, because fun pointlessness spreads like a virus.


If someone says "Is this okay?" you say?
- Shake a Tail Feather

How would you describe yourself?
- Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head (which is why I'm so wet)

What do you like in a guy/girl?
- Funky Gibbon (well who wouldn't?)

How do you feel today?
- Seven Years

What is your life’s purpose?
- Naked

What is your motto?
- Do They Know It's Christmas?

What do your friends think of you?
- Merry Christmas Everybody (honest this is on random!)

What do you think of your parents?
- Ring Out Solstice Bells

What do you think about very often?
- One Flight Down

What is 2 + 2?
- Time Warp (an accountant's answer if ever I heard one)

What do you think of your best friend?
- All That Jazz

What do you think of the person you like?
- Yoam Wara Yoam (thank you Halla, translation - day after day)

What is your life story?
- Private Investigations

What do you want to be when you grow up?
- Little Saint Nick

What do you think of when you see the person you like?
- Canadian Barn Dance

What is your hobby/interest?
- The Christmas Song

What is your biggest fear?
- Driving Home For Christmas

What is your biggest secret?
- A Proper Chrimbo

What do you think of your friends?
- Deck The Halls

What will you post this as?
- Mama (how apt - I'm only on FB because of my children!)

25 Random Things About Heather

This is a facebook game that is interesting, the idea is to write 25 random things about yourself and in facebook you tag 25 friends as an invitation for them to follow suit. Here of course the famous Multiply Inbox does that for you ;)

1. Heather knows she's too old for all this facebook lark, and all those who agree can stop reading now.
2. Heather has been traced from Hmacca via H******bells to H******momo, so much for secret internet identities. I wonder if G****** is still safe?
3. Heather is disproportionately annoyed by friend rejections. I'm not planning to stalk C, in fact I'm not that interested! Still pissed off though.
4. Heather's secret power is Invisibility. (Actually it's not that amazing - all 'femmes d'un certain age' are invisible. It's still cool though)
5. Heather broke her arm when she was (about) 4 and distinctly remembers walking along a high wall, falling and breaking her arm. People who were there seem to think it was broken by her sister while carrying her up the stairs. False memory syndrome huh, how could all these people have got it so wrong?
6. The arm may well have been an accident but said sister used to bite Heather hard and then found it funny that she stopped crying when shushed and given a cuddle.
7. Actually while we're dredging up memories of sibling abuse, my sisters also used to find it hilarious to give me cold tea to drink and call it flat Coca Cola. (I still don't like Coca Cola)
8. Even so Heather still believes it is better to have siblings than to be an only child.
9. Heather spends 8 and a half hours a week sitting on buses travelling to work, and nearly 4 hours hanging around bus stops waiting for buses. That's more than nearly 4 weeks a year!
10. That I sat and worked that out says more about me than I want you to know
11. Heather has less patience than she needs
12. A week later and I am still less than halfway through ...
13. Heather once worked in a shoe shop
14. Heather hated the Brownies and had to be forced back there by her mother
15. Heather wanted to join the Guides but was too embarrassed to roll up in a Brownie uniform with no badges on it
16. Heather never had the wit to join the Guides anyway and pretend she had had a glorious Brownie career but had misplaced her uniform in the move
17. Heather scored a glorious 20/20 in the Guardian spelling quiz today link - go on, bet you can't equal that!
18. Heather has loathed Valentine's day all her life
19. The high point of my first day behind the perfume counter at Boots was when I swung round and sent a tall arrangement of glass shelves artfully stacked with exotic perfumes crashing to the floor
20. The low point of my Boots career was being dumped by Christmas card at the till. (This was before they invented text messages)
21. There was a dusky pink pair of shoes in the shoe shop I must have tried on a hundred times, but I left before I could decide whether to buy them. They were beautiful though.
22. When I was 22 I was often complimented on my 2 delightful little girls. (I wonder what happened to them?)
23. At 23 I passed my driving test.
24. Heather knows fine well that youngest children are favoured and has benefited from that all her life.
25. Heather is mightily relieved to have reached 25!

(According to the official instructions: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

Hamlet January 2009 Novello Theatre

I had been looking forward to this since Summer 2008. Hamlet, a play I studied at school, with one of my absolutely favourite actors - David Tennant.

I first saw David Tennant in 2005 in Look Back in Anger at the Lyceum in Edinburgh. (Hark at me! If it wasn't for Vicky I'd never see the inside of a theatre!) review He was absolutely mesmerising and the way he railed at his life was unforgettable.

When he was announced as Doctor Who a couple of months later I was agog to see how he would play such a well loved character, needless to say he has been amazing, playing the Doctor as a manic, mercurial character.

I was keen to see how he would play the madness of Hamlet, but in the event he was more restrained than I expected. Of course he wouldn't want to play Hamlet as an impression by Doctor Who.

The performance was really enjoyable, the whole cast were top form actors and they complemented each other well. At first I wondered why Patrick Stewart was playing both the ghost and Hamlet's uncle, Claudius, then during the closet scene it dawned on me - of course, they are brothers.

Even the set was amazing, the stage was completely mirrored, and the reflections even reflected off the ornate mirrors in the auditorium. Several times, I glanced to the side, to get an alternative view of the action reflected from the stage to the walls. (I am too used to the editing in films and tv!)

The highlight of the evening was the dumbshow just before the play within a play. the dumbshow king, queen and poisoner were terrific. And Hamlet managed to get a modern take on the "country matters" line, recreating the shock factor of the original pun by inserting a pause in the phrase to bring it bang up to date. (It certainly shocked me!) The gravedigger was marvellous too.

Hamlet may be a tragedy but I enjoyed the laughs!

Wolf Totem

Category: Books
Genre: Literature & Fiction
Author: Jiang Rong
This is a fantastic book that shows how important it is to maintain balance in an ecosystem.

The tale is that of a chinese student during the Cultural Revolution who is posted to Mongolia to live with the nomadic herdsmen there. He learns of the importance of the Mongolian Wolves to all the species that inhabit the grassland, from the grass itself to the human herdsmen. The wolves affect the hardiness and temperament of the dogs, the horses, the sheep and the people. Maintaining the balance between wolves, gazelles, sheep, marmots and even mice (the little lives) enables the grassland itself (the big life) to thrive.

The book is a fictionalised account of the authors own experiences during this time, and was a huge bestseller in China when it was published in 2004, and in translation by Howard Goldblatt in 2007 won the Man Asian literary prize.

I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes animals, other cultures, the world we live in.

London on a hundred pounds - including hotel!

It's January and what with Christmas, moving and everything I don't have 2 brown ha'pennies to rub together. My dear daughter Vicky arranged a trip to London for the two of us to see Hamlet starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart, two very able and experienced shakespearian actors, (as well as being Doctor Who and Captain Jean-Luc Picard!) who also happen to be two very attractive men.... But it was the quality of the acting we were going for!

Anyway back to London, Vicky arranged the tickets, booked the train and found a nice cheap hotel back in Summer when she was flush and could afford to splash it around a bit. Then just after our frugal Christmas, it dawned on her that although the hotel was booked it wasn't paid for! Well I had a hundred pounds stashed away for the trip, so we would be able to pay for the room, but it would just mean that we would have to make a cheap trip positively stingy!

Our secret weapon would be a "mum special" packed lunch! My mum is a great one for feeding people, and all through my childhood and that of my children, no-one could travel further than a few miles without a stash of egg sandwiches, ham sandwiches and fruit. After years of rejecting this bounty I did a quick U-turn and asked her to chip in with some food for the trip... which is how I ended up on the Caledonian Sleeper with a suitcase crammed full of frozen sandwiches, crisps, bananas and peaches!

On Monday the 5th we caught the sleeper and were deposited in London at 7:30 am on a freezing January morning. We decided to buy a couple of tube tickets that would allow us to travel freely across the centre of London, and head to Westminster and try to find a greasy spoon for a cheap fry up and a coffee.

We emerged from the Tube station near Big Ben so walked over Westminster Bridge taking photos


the aforementioned greasy spoon proved elusive to track down so we sat in Parliament square near Nelson Mandela's statue and grabbed a couple of egg rolls out of my suitcase. Suitably refreshed, we had a wee wander around the area. Parliament square has very few people wandering around and the reason could be that it is really a busy roundabout surrounding a green square with a permanent anti-Iraq protest, several statues, some invitingly empty benches and NO pedestrian crossings to access it. We didn't notice this until we were marooned in the middle and trying to find a safe way back to the pavement! Westminster Abbey stood by looking lovely and golden in the brilliant sunshine, and we wandered over to it, however we didn't go inside partly because it was such a lovely day and mainly because it would have cost us £24 to cross the threshold! (Everything they say about Scots must be true!) We wandered up a street at random and found ourselves in St James' Park where Vicky found a friendly pelican taking the air and trying to elude a gardener in green overalls who was trying to get it to go to the frozen lake.

We saw quite a nice glimpse of Buckingham Palace from where we were standing, but with suitcases and sandwiches and pelicans and all, I gave up on taking photos and left it to Vicky, so we've no pictures of the queen's house. We admired the partially frozen lake and the ducks who were standing on it and wandered off up Horseguards Parade to try and find somewhere we knew. We had no map but Horseguards Parade leads onto the Mall (another view of the queen's house) and if you nip through an arch and go off to the side there before you is Trafalgar Square! I had only been driven round Trafalgar Square in a taxi and I hadn't noticed that it is actually right in front of the National Gallery. (I thought there were roads all round it - a bit like George Square in Glasgow - I'll admit it, I'm a provincial)

We spent some time there, admiring the frozen fountains (Ice? In London? It's always warmer down south than up our way!) and looking up at Nelson on his column (it's a nice detailed statue for all it's so high up, he's standing in front of a coil of rope) and wondering if it would be possible to climb up on the lions to get a photo... we resisted the impulse. Then off to the left we found the goal of our search - a wee café serving coffee and breakfast! We had a full English breakfast (which included toast and coffee, but only had a single sausage! Poor thing, how lonely!) and an extra coffee. Vicky had the breakfast and I ate the toast. £7 gone from our reserves but we did ok. I suppose cheap cafés are not to be had in a tourist area that is also at the centre of government.

Suitably refreshed, we wandered off down to the river and found ourselves near the Jubilee Bridges. These are a pair of footbridges across the Thames built to commemorate the Queen's golden jubilee. They are built alongside a railway bridge, so on one bridge there is a view off to the West with the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye, and on the East bridge, is a view of the City of London with the OXO tower, the Gherkin etc. I'm not great with heights or bridges, I have to cross them exactly in the middle with my eyes fixed firmly to the ground, I can only raise my eyes if I am holding on to something (much like when I visited the great wall!) To admire the view I had to shuffle to the edge, grip the rail for dear life and only then could I look up and out!

Having crossed the bridges safely we descended into the depths of the tube heading for the Natural History Museum and the dinosaurs! Museums have fairly improved since I was 7, we went round the dinosaur exhibit twice but the T-Rex remained sleeping.


We also managed to look at the stuffed animals and the whales. Why do museums feel the need to have po-faced explanations that they no longer stuff animals for exhibition and that the exhibits they do have are old and from an unenlightened time? I like stuffed animals, although I'm not suggesting they go out and gun down endangered species for my pleasure, but why not stuff any animals that keel over in the zoo?

I must say, if you're watching the pennies, London's museums, squares and "sights" are good value. You can ooh and ah at the famous buildings, and if it is cold or rains, visiting the museums for free can't be bettered!

After that it was back to the tube in order to find what kind of hotel in Bayswater only charges £55 for a room for two people. And the answer to that is a nice clean one! The furniture arrangement was a little eccentric, a double bed in front of the window and perpendicular to that a single bed in front of a wardrobe which in turn was in front of a door! But the beds were clean and comfy, there was a sink and a wee telly, and the loo and shower were only a couple of steps outside the room.

We had sausage rolls (home made from mum! yum), and a wee snooze - well we had been walking round and round London lugging bags and a case! Then we roused ourselves in order to get to the theatre for the main event!

The journey to the theatre was a wee bit daunting. According to the tiny map in the Caledonian Sleeper's guide to London (we really should have got a tourist map) the nearest tube to the theatre was a just a short walk away... but the whole map was only 2" by 3"! We did find it but it was a bit worrying not being sure where we were heading. We arrived at the theatre with half an hour to curtain up and hadn't eaten yet. (egg sandwiches aren't quite the thing for Hamlet) so we had a wander round and found another café and settled for a baked potato and a lasagne, not bad though - I bet no-one else in the audience had a pre theatre supper for £11!

Once we walked into the theatre all thoughts of penny pinching went to the wall. We walked into the lap of luxury, gilt mirrors on the walls, velvet seats, thick carpets. Seats in the centre of the stalls! No climbing up the back staircase to a seat so high you're sharing with the pigeons. Vicky had done us proud. The only worry was whether we would get a six foot man with a top hat on sitting infront of us. There was one moment when Hardeep Singh walked in with an enormous yellow turban on, but luckily he sat elsewhere. Vicky and I had a bit of fun taking photos of ourselves with the programme hoping it would look like David Tennant had popped down to see us ... ....
...then we settled down to enjoy the show. Hamlet takes a bit of time you know, and we enjoyed every minute of it. Sheer luxury, then having had a wonderful evening we hopped back on the tube and headed back to our hotel, where we slept the sleep of the righteous.

The next morning we set off back to the railway station to catch a train back to Edinburgh, but first we popped into a nice coffee shop to have a coffee and croissant, a little extravangance to round off a very economical trip!

Not counting train fares and theatre tickets, which are what we accountants call sunk costs and can safely be ignored, the whole trip came in at under £100 pounds:
Hotel £55 + Tube Fares £25 + Food £20 (thanks to mum's sandwiches, which kept us going through the day - and the remaining ham sandwiches sustained us on the train)