Well, another day of adventures, and we are in the middle of our holiday.
We are becoming perfect metropolitans.
I have been very busy and I am almost going to start getting ready for bed, so you have just got a few weary minutes of my time before I get in the shower.
We have had the most wonderful day.
The hotel serves excellent breakfasts, and we had two each, along with about a gallon of coffee, as a way of helping to cancel out last night’s cocktails in the bar before bed.
These had been a truly splendid concoction made of bourbon and tobacco and sour cherries. I do not know how they managed to get the tobacco in. The only tobacco I have ever encountered needed to be smoked or possibly chewed. I have never come across it in a drink before.
It was jolly good.
We have not done this tonight because we got back too late, but we have had rather a lot of wine already, so probably this might be just as well.
After breakfast we got on the tube.
I pause there to reflect on how sophisticated we have become already. Yesterday the tube was an anxious and puzzling affair. Today we blithely waved our credit cards and were wafted off across London at high speed without a second thought.
We went to Harrods.
Harrods was ace.
I do not know what the children did. They buzzed off on adventures of their own. Mark and I explored the food hall and looked keenly at everything that people were doing.
There was not by much going on in there that we could not do just as well at home, apart from a few peculiar looking fruits that we could not identify. London is full of very fashionable food. Even the post office up the road from the hotel was selling jalapeño flavoured nuts and oat milk.
Harrods Food Hall is beautiful, and manages to make even simple things, like pies, look unspeakably sophisticated and delicious. We did not purchase any, but I do not expect they would have been noticeably much better than the pies we make at home, just more beautiful.
We looked at the chocolate makers with very great interest, and if we get around to it we will be coming up with all sorts of new creations next Christmas. We watched somebody creating little chocolate medallions with Harrods stamped on them, which we could do ourselves at home now that we know how it is done, except we are not Harrods, and to stamp Ibbetson on them would need a bigger bit of chocolate, so maybe we will have to think of something else. We could probably stamp Nice on them, by way of encouragement.
The lady on the counter gave us some chocolate to try, and it was not greatly different to our own, so we did not buy any, even though it came in a box with a gold ribbon. It would be cheaper just to buy gold ribbon and carry on making our own.
We ambled back again, deep in creative thought. The children had made it back to the hotel before we did, and there was a swimming pool, so we did that next.
The swimming pool had a jacuzzi, with the most exciting high-pressure water squirting tap. This made me feel rather like a misfortunate spider that nobody noticed in the shower tray. We all massaged our backs with it, and then our feet, and then squirted one another.
In the end we had to get out because of going to the theatre again and needing dinner first.
We set off early because Oliver wanted to see Piccadilly at night, and jolly splendid it was as well, exactly the way it looks in films, except we only looked from the ground, not from exciting film angles.
We had a shockingly dreadful dinner, oddly served in one of the most beautiful restaurants I have ever visited. Filled with marble archways and blue and gold Victorian mosaics, I could have looked all night, but of course we didn’t because of going to the theatre.
We went to see The Book Of Mormon, and we are all still singing the songs now, because it was brilliant.
I knew nothing about it before we set off, and could not imagine how you could make such a dull and prickly subject entertaining, nor how one might finish up with a happy end: but it was sublime. It succeeded effortlessly on all counts, and we laughed and cheered our heads off, because it was a work of brilliance. If you have never seen it, go.
The children danced all the way home, and we would have done as well if it had not been for the knee and hip things that happen when you are over fifty.
It was a true delight.
This is turning into the most wonderful holiday.
Harry Potter tomorrow.
