Return To Britain 2022

FOR THE FIRST TIME since my ex-wife spent a night in hospital nine years ago and our (then) six-month-old son spent the whole night crying and wailing, I’m pulling an allnighter: I have to be at Heathrow soon after 6am to go through the usual rigmarole ahead of a 9am flight to Abu Dhabi and thence home to Melbourne, and as this really necessitates being ready to go before 5am, there’s not much point risking a missed alarm or three. I will sleep on the aircraft. Fitfully, and in short bursts, but I will sleep.

I’m starting to feel a bit stiff and sore, and for all the wrong reasons; having lugged my fat-arse suitcase from Heathrow to the train terminal beneath it yesterday, and then from Chiswick Park station to my hotel past Gunnersbury to avoid a second change of train — and having carted a growing number of shopping bags through central London today for several hours — my shoulders, arms, and one side of my neck (the side I favour for lifting heavy loads) are all registering their protests this evening.

One can only imagine what state they’ll be in when I finally walk in my front door in Melbourne on Sunday night…

I’ve been in London this afternoon buying stuff for my kids; it wasn’t possible to enable them to come on this trip, and I have been anxious to ensure there’s enough for them when I get home to make them feel like there’s been a dividend for them from Dad disappearing for a month. Between the two of them, there’s about £400 worth of stuff cramming every last inch of space in the fat-arse suitcase, and in the backpack responsible for pulling muscles on my left shoulder and neck.

I can’t elaborate on precisely what’s occupied that space; there’s a risk my daughter, at least (who is extremely media-literate and internet savvy) may chance upon this very site, and a surprise is meant to be a surprise…but I can say that some of the stores involved read like a “who’s who?” of traditional London retailers, including Fortnum and Mason, Waterstones, and Hamleys of London, which bills itself as the oldest and most famous toy shop in the world (and probably is, dating as it does to 1760), in addition to purchases made in the gift shop at Blenheim Palace, Walker Slater in Glasgow, and a particular museum in North Yorkshire.

(I’ll add that provided it isn’t confiscated by Customs in Melbourne, fat-arse also contains a Dundee cake from Fortnums…I love Dundee cake…)

My trip into central London was not devoid of tedium; I’d made it from Chiswick to Piccadilly (a good 45 minutes by train, plus walking time), and had picked out the Dundee cake and (ahem!) a couple of other items at Fortnum and Mason, only to find — when I went to the pay point — that before I left Chiswick I’d picked up my room key, my Oyster card…and my myki card (for the uninitiated, myki is the Melbourne equivalent of an Oyster card for paying public transport fares, albeit infinitely less functional). My credit card was sitting on the dresser in my hotel room…

…and so — after a return trip between Piccadilly and Chiswick to collect the bloody credit card — I restarted my shopping mission at Fortnum and Mason at 4.30pm. Grrr…

The afternoon in London wasn’t devoid of light relief, either; walking up Regent Street en route to Hamleys, I spotted New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern coming the other way on foot. “Jacinda Ardern,” I said. “Oh, hiiiiiiiiiii!” she replied effusively, looking as if she was going to stop and chat (which she didn’t, thankfully). She looked a bit surprised anyone had recognised her, to be honest. “Just keep moving,” admonished what I took to be a security minder two paces behind her. And that was that.

I looked around a bit nervously: was Albo out shopping too?

And the three women (who looked like they’d stepped out of The Only Way Is Essex) who were running up and down the middle of Regent Street trying to hail a cab — while running a loud and obnoxious commentary on their own endeavours — bemused and amused the scores of horrified but delighted onlookers who watched the debacle unfold. It was difficult not to speculate in which of the salubrious bars and saloons adorning Piccadilly Circus they’d spent the balance of the afternoon making extensive investments in tomorrow morning’s hangover.

Finally, the shopping for my kids was complete (and the expenditure, including the items purchased elsewhere around the United Kingdom, was more or less even: one is inadvertently getting £8 more than the other, which out of a £400 spend is hardly an outrage of unfairness), but I realised that given it was after 6pm and I was weighed down with parcels, there was no way I was going to get back to my hotel, and then back into London a third time for the dinner I wanted so badly at Roast: I don’t regret it, for the credit card oversight was my own fault, and I think it more important to ensure the kids get what I wanted them to have than ensuring I got to eat Beef Wellington overlooking the Borough Market.

And it wouldn’t have done to have hauled all that stuff across to London Bridge to cut the trip to my hotel out, either: I’m sure Iqbal wouldn’t have wanted what would have looked like a market stall being set up in his restaurant alongside my table.

So (in a move my aching limbs are already regretting), I decided to wander down to Trafalgar Square instead, and head up the mall to Buckingham Palace; as people will have seen at the top of this post, it’s being readied for Her Majesty’s funeral on Monday, when her body will depart Buckingham Palace at 2.22pm on its journey to Westminster Abbey.

Already, parts of it are partitioned off, and members of the public being funnelled along metal-fenced corridors on either side of the Mall; rather stupidly, I opted to head off down the Mall, thinking I’d at least get a photograph of the tributes outside the gates of the Palace.

Ha, ha, ha…

Suddenly, I didn’t feel like such a cheapskate for not bringing flowers: it wasn’t possible to wait until 10 o’clock at night, and so I would never have been able to add them to the tributes anyway.

But surely, the important thing is that I made the effort to come at all? Of the hundreds of millions of people for whom the Queen was either Head of State and/or a role model, a respected figure of leadership, or simply someone liked and admired, the overwhelming majority would not have had the opportunity to even get as close as I did today, and that includes the vast majority of the 70 million people who live in Britain itself.

Readers will have seen various photographs over the past week featuring flags at half mast — including, to my pleasant surprise, in Scotland — and the tributes and marks of respect have been everywhere; I do feel it’s been an accidental privilege to spend this time among British people, and to see and hear their heartfelt sadness and grief that the Queen is gone. Nobody has had anything bad to say about Charles, interestingly; the British — with their tremendous sense of fair play — may very well be keeping their counsel on that one and seeing how he does, or their reservations may simply be “on hold” during this period steeped in the utmost respect.

Either way, the anguish is genuine, and the markers of it widespread; many retailers across Britain have placed displays in their shop windows (with some even creating shrines to the Queen inside their stores).

But as I near the end of the final post I will publish on this travelogue whilst on British soil — and this will come as no surprise to those who know me — I am going to miss London, just as I miss Scotland already: I love coming here, and London genuinely feels like a home away from home, as does Scotland. I’ve been to a lot of great places across England and Scotland on this visit, and I’ve met some sensational people, some of whom I’ll stay in contact with.

There are those I was able to catch up with that I’ve waited a long time to be able to sit down with, and the handful with whom I couldn’t — largely on account of the havoc that bout of illness wrought for a couple of the precious few days I had in London at the start of the trip — I’ll either see next time, or catch up with in Australia if they head our way. I know a few are proposing to do precisely that.

Those who read my initial post on this site on 24 August will know I came on this trip for a plentitude of reasons and with things to do and accomplish; with the few exceptions noted below, I would have to say I got everything I came here for: including the little matter of head clearing and banishing something from my past, which simply doesn’t merit or warrant the bother, given the circumstances. It just doesn’t matter any more.

And while Marcus Wareing’s restaurant was closed (for renovations, I believe) for the duration of the month I’ve been here — and while I missed out on visiting Westerham and Chartwell due to that horrific navigational fail the day I set forth on the road, and have missed out on eating at Roast through illness and my own forgetfulness with the credit card today — these could be regarded as very early items for a list of things to do next time: and whilst I have certain priorities to pursue when I return to Australia that will take time, this isn’t my last visit to the UK. Far from it.

The simple truth is that just as I love Australia, I love Britain too; I have always said I could appear at Heathrow, descend into its Underground station, and just disappear: it was with great satisfaction that I did exactly that four weeks ago, with assistance neither required nor sought (apart from needing help with a defective Oyster card payment machine, which doesn’t qualify). It remains one of my few genuine regrets in life that I’ve never been able to live here — at least for a time — and now aged 50, the prospect of being able to do so is becoming sharply less likely.

There will be those who sneer, and bleat about forelock tugging and disloyalty, but I don’t care; it is perfectly legitimate to love two countries to which there is a genuine connection. I identify as a Scottish Australian anyway — I always have, and with faultless familial reasons for it — but London sits alongside Melbourne as the two best cities on the planet in my eyes, and I’m not a native of either.

And to those who decry British history — and our British inheritance as a country — on the basis it is somehow evil and morally repugnant, I simply say that it could be a hell of a lot worse; the civilised world has evolved, grown and moved on, but there are others who haven’t and won’t: and if the Marxist “woke” crowd doesn’t believe that, it should look at what’s going on eastern Europe right now, or in parts of Asia, and be a little more careful and circumspect about what it wishes for.

(There are Ukrainian refugees everywhere in the UK at the moment; one night in Scotland I was sitting in a bar when an eight-year-old Ukrainian boy came in; he was brandishing a toy Kalashnikov: after seeking and receiving a hug from the astonished bartender — a gorgeous Scottish girl in her early 20s — he tried to get patrons to play a game with him called “self defence:” they had to try to shoot him, and he would defend himself with the toy gun. Just think about that).

This won’t be the final post on this site, however; once I’m back in Melbourne I do intend to review the places I’ve been, the accommodation and the food I’ve experienced, and perhaps a few other bits and pieces too. Just give me a few days, one of which will be spent at 37,000 feet.

But I’m off for a shower (the last one for almost 30 hours, to be sure); then it’s Gunnersbury Station (about a quarter of a mile away) to Turnham Green, then a change for a Piccadilly Line train to Heathrow…and then away we go.

Even lugging fat-arse around like that, the fare is £4.90, as opposed to a taxicab estimate of £40 to £50…if ever there was a concrete quantification of the price of laziness, that must surely be it 🙂