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)
