Phil and Carl’s Magical Trip to London

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!

London 2012 Olympics – Days 1 - 3

Back in 2005 we won the games
Thanks in part to two key names
David Beckham and Sebastian Coe
Would now go on to run the show

We beat the French to host the games
And not soon after we heard complaints
“We’re coming into a deep recession
“Has the Government not learnt its lesson?”

But the building began and up it grew
From East end wasteland coming up anew
New stadia built, impressive looking
Regenerated land was up and coming

But what of the stadium when the Olympics end?
For one football club it would be a god send
Crazily Hotspurs just wanted the land
Why demolish a new building? So we chose West Ham

The parodies were quite fair
Twenty Twelve was on air
Not too far from the truths
With their fictional goofs

The new logo was shown
And one fact it was known
A child of about ten
Could have done a better attempt

The graffiti style would have been seen
As appealing quite well to the British teen
It showed 2012 but what we all saw instead
Was Lisa from the Simpsons giving some head

And so 2012 came and arrived here quite fast
And the stadia was finished with time spare – aghast!
Will the transport plan set out be up to the strain?
With newly painted obvious Olympic car lanes?

We would get a new cable car crossing the Thames
Which would go at two speeds during the games
But we didn’t quite know when it got a little hot
That mid journey over it would break down and stop

The Olympic torch started its journey around
Going here, going there, to all cities and towns
With bad weather and nudists and protesters a test
But still the flame travelled and completed its quest

It went in a rowing boat, went on a zip wire
As 95% of Britains saw the great fire
And it went to Lands End and John O’Groats later
Not bad for something looking like a cheese grater

And people looked proud as they ran with the flame
Even if all TV footage looked pretty much the same
(And did you know you could buy your torch by the way
And make a nice profit by flogging it on eBay)

As the games came much nearer the news got quite mean
As we found out that Beckham had been dropped by the team
And after poor shows in sport in Wimbledon and the Euros
We looked forward to better from our Olympic heroes

But we didn’t realise that G4S guards didn’t show
And we were left with a shortfall with two weeks to go
So we drafted in coppers and soldiers back from Iraq
And demanded that G4S pay some money back

But the benefit it seems of having soldiers on hand
Coming back from defending us in foreign lands
Was when there were seats left empty in farces
They could be filled by our boys sat down on their arses

The football kicked off the Olympic games
With Scotland hosting two footballing teams
But there was only one major snag
Some idiot with PowerPoint Googled the wrong bloody flag

North Korea were miffed, insulted away from London
Which is not good for a country with its finger on the button
The apology was swift, the error repealed
Allowing the team to come back on the field

And just when it was starting, oh how we did laugh
When Presidental hopeful Mitt Romney made quite such a gaff
He said that a few thing maybe “were disconcerting”
But we sent him back to his home country smarting

(It was quite incredible really
It did quite astound
That we got behind Boris
On the moral high ground)

We got some new tunes like ‘Survival’ by Muse
And to be honest it was a bit rubbish, not a song I would choose
I’d rather have a song promoting competitive drinking
‘The Beer Olympics’ by the Lancashire Hotpots is what I am thinking!

And so soon came the opening ceremony directed by Boyle
And lots of actors, and nurses and animals did toil
To bring us a spectacular feast for the senses
(Which is quite good as it was quite expensive)

We enjoyed some Victorian dancing and chimneys that grew
And an inflatable Voldermort and a Mary Poppins or two
Oh how we laughed when we saw Mr Bean
But that was topped by a parachuting queen

You’ve not seen an opening that will make you smirk
Unless you throw from a plane your reigning monarch
The music was great, (the lesbian kiss perhaps a little rude)
But after the Jubilee Concert who wanted Paul’s Hey Jude?

There were lots of great moments, too many to name
From the sound of a TARDIS to youths lighting the flame
Which was similar to last year but different as well
As they weren’t looting shops at the same time looking for things to sell

But it wasn’t all smooth running, it went onto quite early
The athlete walk-past was tedious, and don’t mention Aidan Burley
An MP criticising the multiculturalism and saying it’s quite lefty
And being a little racist about the London opening ceremony

Just say the social networks got really quite bitter
And he got a drubbing when posting on Twitter
And then there was that sight, was it just a dream
But who was that woman with the Indian team?

The ceremony ended the actors went to the pub
And fell asleep and didn’t see the NBC snub
Cutting out crucial elements like the 7/7 dance piece
And the kiss between two women that even went out in the Middle East

And the games then began, the first day of a huge feat
Just the shame that there were just so many empty seats
Coe said it is fine, the seats are filled to the gunnels
But seats were still empty, it wasn’t that funny

Transport was going, it can be said, reasonably well
With little reported gridlocking hell
And to prove it was quite progressive and not such a boob
We saw David Cameron riding the tube

The medals started coming though we were behind China
With a silver for Armitstead, with the Bronze behind her
No luck for the road race they ended up not quite winning
Thank God for Adlington getting a bronze in the swimming

With Paula Radcliffe out of the marathon due to a sprain
And questions about the cauldron no longer with flame,
With Tom Daley in fourth and Swiss footballing racism
All we wanted was a little bit of sporting escapism

So what will come next on this Olympic journey
Which athletes it seems will be going home early?
How many people will see all the records?
After problems with seats, flags and security guards?