Last weekend myself and friend Carl headed down to London to see a gig – the incredible Electric Six at Shepherd’s Bush Empire – but also enjoyed the best of what the capital has to offer.
We set down early on the Saturday morning on the National Express and I have to confess I was a little bit the worse for wear after the staff Christmas do the night before – don’t mix cider and wine and no water, kids! – so the first two hours were an experience in keeping it all down. It’s not helped by the fact that the reclining seats on National Express coaches don’t particularly recline back that far. Thankfully by the time we stopped off at the delightfully title ‘Trowell’ services I was feeling much better and ready to face the rest of the journey that remained relatively uneventful. We soon arrived at Victoria Coach station and getting ready for the day.
Firstly it was off to the hotel via the Underground and, as sod’s law dictates, my day pass (£7) didn’t work so for the rest of the day had to constantly flash my ticket (steady!) at the turnstile operators. We jumped on the tube over to Kings Cross and then down to our hotel, the straight up titled ‘Euro Hotel’ on Cartwright Gardens, a beautiful crescent familiar from many television shows and films. We checked in – annoyingly for my bank balance we then had to pay for the hotel room (£63) which I thought I’d paid for back in April when I booked the room – and I got room 13, unlucky for the same. The room was small but had everything that was needed from a bed, TV, sink, wardrobe, kettle and fresh towels among other bits and bobs, plus a neat view out of the window. The toilet and shower was communal but was very clean so no complaints there.
Having unpacked a little we then headed off for our meeting with some friends in the Wetherspoons (“Central Bar”) in Shepherd’s Bush, several tube trips away. The underground was weird on a Saturday as, instead of the usual weekday push and pull that you get normally, everyone seemed to be ambling along and it was me ploughing through the place.
We soon got to Wetherspoons, ten or so minutes later than our meeting time of 2pm, and this was an experience. It was insanely busy and we had to wait a while for a table. This did allow us to prop up the bar and realise the drinks prices were the same as in Bradford, so that’s a win, but that the Saturday staff were particularly daft. One left a frustrated cockney – whose ramblings were approaching cliché – waiting five minutes before he could put his pin number in a machine. A second dropped a customer’s change into his pint and then shrugged his shoulders when the customer commented on this.
It was, though, by Wetherspoons standards, quite posh, in that they didn’t have a table of packaged sauces, but brought them round on a little tray, which is thumbs up for a sauce fan like me and actually Heinz Mayonnaise is particularly tasty!
Myself and some friends I met through the internet over a love of Electric Six enjoyed a few hours in each other’s company, enjoying 2 for £10 cocktails – including the delicious strawberry daiquiri – and some of the rather eccentric other patrons you can only get in a Wetherspoons on a Saturday. And everything was served in plastics as if they expected an Eastenders fight to break out at any moment.
As the day progressed we headed off to the gig and out of the shopping complex and across to the Academy, out on a surprisingly warm Saturday evening. There we had to queue twice – first for a wristband, then to show a ticket – in the most badly planned out entry into a venue yet but the gig was amazing, and you can read all about that at http://wavgoodbye.blogspot.com/2012/12/electric-six-live-at-shepherds-bush.html)
We then headed back to the hotel early the next morning to enjoy a good sleep though the room was absolutely boiling.
Breakfast the next morning was earlier than we’d like but was nice. There was a choice of four cereals, yoghurts, fruit (weirdly including bananas cut in two) and coffee, but no tea. The title of ‘Euro Hotel’ was well deserved as we were probably the only two English people in the room as we were delivered our fried breakfast, a tasty plate even if the tomato had only been briefly introduced to the grill, but we got the full works and toast. But no tea. Grr.
Having filled up on breakfast we headed out for our day of exploring London. Firstly we headed off to the London Eye on a lengthy Tube journey due to the Waterloo line being closed but this was only revealed over the tannoy just as we got to the line. We grabbed a ticket each (£18.90) which is relatively good value considering the much smaller York wheel is £10 and the queue was short and we were on quickly after a quick bag check and a look over with the paddle tool thing. Getting on the London Eye is a weird experience as it never stops but if you did miss the platform to get on it there would have been a metre fall. Getting on it was easy though and I enjoyed the 28-minute journey around it and, considering I’m not a big fan of heights, didn’t find it a problem. I got some good photos and the weather was perfect for the occasion, and the trip was rounded up in the adjoining building where I got a photo with a celebrity I didn’t recognise in a small Madame Tussauds, enjoyed a four-minute 4D experience with a 3D seagull, live fans and bubbles which was a nice extra distraction, and bought some souvenirs at the gift shop which included novelty souvenir condoms with an, er, erect picture of the famous London clock tower on them, labelled ‘Would you like to see Big Ben?’. No, actually.
Having exhausted the London Eye we then took a trip to Greenwich to see Canary Wharf on the way (humming the Apprentice theme as we went), seeing a flotilla of paper boats in the water for some reason, and the delightfully titled ‘Mudchutes’ stop on the DLR; the Cutty Sark – not paying the £10 to go in, just admiring it from the outside); and stopping off to use the loo in one of the weirdest contraptions ever. I hate to talk about something so random in this blog but it was the size of a bathroom, cost 50p and spent five minutes after you’d been in automatically flushing, spraying something and, er, washing the floor. What did they expect you to do in there? There was also a twenty minute limit inside. I’m not sure if the door would open mid-visit if you exceeded the twenty minutes but I didn’t want to find out, not that you needed twenty minutes really.
We then headed off to Greenwich Market, which was a great experience and I picked up lots of great presents and picked up a delicious steak and cheese sandwich that may have looked disgusting but tasted great, and I ate it in the shadow of the Greenwich college. There was also a great board game shop full of great distractions.
We then went up to the Greenwich Observatory which gave a great view of Canary Wharf and the Millennium Dome among other things and also gave us the chance to stand by the Greenwich Mean Line.
It was then another series of tube journeys back to Central London – stopping via Shadwell Overground for a quick photo as it features in game of the moment ZombiU – before we headed to the Science Museum where I bought some more Christmas presents and wse had a look around the, surprisingly smaller than I remember, museum but it was deadly quiet late on a Sunday and wasn’t the most exciting attraction I’ve ever visited. We did, though, save people from drowning in a global warming simulator, see what we’d look like when we’re older and visit the Google Lab which had two working attractions and the others were being done remotely by internet users, so a little pointless. It also rained for the first time at the weekend.
It was then off to another Wetherspoons for drinks, this time in Victoria station, which was just as busy as the Saturday one but certainly not as cheap. Here we stayed to enjoy a burger each before passing over to the Victoria Coach Station to get the coach back, luckily being allowed on an early coach that got us back to Bradford forty minutes earlier than the one we would have normally got and missed out stopping at Milton Keynes. Phew.
We have a great driver on the way back who entertained us for the first ten minutes with some great banter, including criticising the traffic from Oxford Street – ‘we’re all from Yorkshire, we can’t afford that shopping. They use their Barclaycard to buy things, I use mine to scrape the ice of my windscreen’.
We arrived back in Bradford about eleven fifteen tired but having enjoyed a great weekend of music, travelling and trips to Wetherspoons!
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