Ever been to London? (part one)

Have you ever been to London? It seems like an odd question to ask someone from Sheffield. It's only a couple of hours away. If you get up early in the morning, walk or drive to the station, make your way to the remote reaches of Platform 8, where the dark walls of Victorian stone loom down on you, you'll find a train straight to London. Yet, lots of people have never seemed to bother. Admittedly it's not a journey without some perils; groups of friends nearby conforming to the usual pattern of friends behaving in public; the one loud one talking to - or maybe at? - his (or her) two quieter friends. Or maybe a family quietly chuckling and smirking at another group of passengers. in fairness to the family the other group of passengers are a fairly preposterous bunch of teenagers with an interesting sartorial quirk that I will refrain from mentioning here lest they one day grow up to become very important people. They too also conform the the pattern - one is talking in a weird pseudo-American-inflected accent (it sounds familiar, perhaps its the voice of the dubbing on Japanese anime shows - something about their appearance leads me to think they may be fans of the genre), about the abilities of his latest phone. And in fairness to the family they are playing cards - what is this, a family actually playing a game? I remember doing that many years ago. and me with all my supposed learning can't remember how to play any card games. Not long ago I was in the company of some very drunk friends of my girlfriend and they could follow the rules of "Chase the ace" better than I could while stone cold sober. Poker is one of those things - like ice skating and knitting - that I have clear memories of being able to do (at lunch times in about year 10) but I have now completely forgotten.

When you travel and arrive in London the sights are still familiar from the past - the gasometer outside St Pancras, the multi storey car park at St Albans, the power station (I still don't know how they make concrete cooling towers). the train doesn't actually arrive in St Pancras any more. it arrives next to St Pancras, in a new bit. the main shed is full of Eurostars and is now bright sky blue instead of gunky orange. I'm struck by how old the Eurostars look already. A weird thought to have while standing in a Victorian train station I know, but still you can only deal with your own reference points in time. Like how the trains used to stop right under the wall at the end, and the tube was down set of stairs and through a dingy industrial feeling tunnel. That corridor and ticket hall felt a bit eerie to a small kid circa 1991, as if the ghosts of the fire that had destroyed it a few years earlier were still there. See, I am getting old now, I even remember the wooden escalators and those dull grey unpainted Northern Line trains they used to have. But for all my nostalgic twangs from the many times I've been to London, and the many times I used to get the Network Southeast Cambridge students smarty-pants express down from Hatfield and then the Thameslink from St Albans a decade ago, this is the first time I've ever stayed in a hotel in London. That time me and my brother crashed in the flat of some guy he house-shared with in Hove counts as staying in London, but we didn't pay for the privilege. Or maybe we did, that was a long time ago too and the details have also faded away. The hotel is the Kings Cross Inn, bang across the street from the building site in front of Kings Cross station. Progress is coming but only after a lot of fences and 'pavement closed' signs.

Dump bags in the store room, it's only 11 am, can't check in yet -- it's only 11, even more proof that Sheffield is not far from London, at least not in terms of miles. Maybe its a long way to listen to Oscar Wilde over there chatting to his mates. Becky tells me its my pick to decide what we do this afternoon. its quite hard to decide as there aren't too many places in central London I haven't seen, at least in passing. Further afield is a different matter, but we're keeping ourselves in the central zones on the tube. But this time I get to take somebody else with me. Back when i used to come here on a Saturday afternoon it was almost always on my own. After a week packed into a small art studio with thirty other people, and then more evenings packed into a communal kitchen with eleven more it was nice to have some freedom to wander about. But now its nice to wander about with somebody else's input. In this case it's Greenwich. She's got a good line in imagination, and will stand on the deck of the magnificent Cutty Sark - restored, with gleaming copper hull propped up in its dry dock like a model ship on a display stand - imagining the crew scuttling about on the deck, or the officers sitting down for dinner. The light drizzle helps to enhance the effect for less whimsical people like me. We look around the ship. Its funny, I can't recall ever seeing anybody else outside of my family taking pictures of the captions in museums and she's also doing it. perhaps I haven't been looking closely enough at other people - well, I do think that glasses restrict one's field of vision. Something similar happened the other week, CTRL ALT DEL got pressed on her laptop when ebay wasn't responding after a few seconds. I do that. All the time. It;s meant to be those little things that matter though isn't it? in those movies that Sandra Bullock is always in they're always more romantic and silly - "that's *MY* favorite movie!!!" "no waaaaay, you like the Red Sox too??? Get out, I've got a season ticket too!" and so forth. but these are technological times and habits with shortcut keys are just as valid as any other endearing gesture if you ask me.

She does look a knockout when we go out in the evening though. all long dark hair blending in with the black at the top of her dress, above the riotous colours of the print. It's not subtle but I like it - it's a dress that seems to say 'yeah? so what?!' with a smile on it's face. That's her to a 'T' - she's a bit wobbly on large escalators (its a bit of a surprise, she dragged me onto that blasted Oblivion contraption on Alton Towers and giggled at my, to quote, "Girly scream") but other than that walks with a stride that seems to say "yeah, I've seen Rotherham after dark, this place ain't dangerous". I feel a bit conspicuous standing outside the hotel next to all the construction works, the McDonalds, the customers for the newsagent, and the passing traffic. it's the shoes; nobody else here is wearing "Shoes". This little section of the Euston Road is like a very brief gauntlet to run for anybody clearly goin' to see Les Mis' in town. Clearly the station engineers understood the desire in tourists to be plunged into the welcoming mixing pot of the Underground concourse as soon as possible, which is why they built an exit right next to the hotel. That exit is boarded off at the moment while construction business goes on below so we have to walk along past the newsagents to the next exit. These little narrow corridors of human activity used to have at least one person begging in them somewhere but these days they're all hanging round next to ATM machines.

Shaftesbury Avenue is great. I suppose in an ideal world the hoardings advertising the plays and musicals wouldn't be quite so big - it would be nice to see the building underneath. We both make the same observation that Piccadilly Circus's famous advertisements look like any other bill board these days. But the mix of people is great - a proper melting pot of a huge cast of characters. Every single person one could possibly imagine is on Shaftesbury Avenue at seven o'clock on Friday night; pensioners, toffs, teenagers, rastafarians, men holding hands, women holding holding hands, impossibly tall heels, hipster beards, parading Indian families, those eternal flocks of camera wielding far-eastern tourists, television newsreaders. It was actually the day after when the television newsreader walked past with his wife. Recognition of the face was immediate but placing it took a few minutes. Its funny really, millions of us flock to the west end to watch the musicals yet the only face I recognized in passing in London that day was a newsreader. The actual cast of Les Miserables were all unknown to me, and I suspect, most of the rest of the audience in the Queen's Theatre. The program listed the names and faces, most had hoity-toity sounding qualifications, with the exception of one of the leads-  he'd been to school in Guildford. They were always listed as being "thrilled/delighted" to be making their West End debut, or return. But I bet the kid from Guildford was probably more thrilled than the poshos.