A(nother) Day In London

On Saturday, I had another London day – they seem to be becoming more common for me currently, and there’s a few more in the near future – which was thoroughly enjoyable, in sometimes unexpected ways.

The primary reason for going was that another friend had bought tickets for a matinee performance of the National Theatre’s “Three Days in the Country“, which I knew absolutely nothing about, but was happy to go and see.  (In fact, that was pretty much the theme for the day, as it worked out)

However, me being me, I decided to make a day of it, and went in dead early. I went in by train, for once (it being an easy walk from Euston down to Waterloo and the South Bank for the NT) and had a basic outline ‘plan’ of “Get in to London, walk down to somewhere central, do something, meet up, see the play”. It really was that basic.

So, for the random thing to do, I ended up going to the Royal Academy and seeing their exhibition of works by Ai Weiwei. I’d been in two minds about seeing this – mainly through not knowing much more about Weiwei than the general media gubbins, and not being overly taken with the stuff of his that I knew of.

As it turned out, the exhibition was brilliant – I really enjoyed it, far more than I’d expected to. As with the Hepworth one I saw a while back, it still had too many people dithering around being fuckwits (which rankles a lot when you’re paying to go in, on allegedly limited numbers) but was still great.

I’ll write more about the exhibition in a different post (because it requires more detail than this one) but if you do get the chance to see it, it’s well worth doing so.

From the RA, I crossed the road and visited Fortnum and Mason, which I hadn’t been in for years. You can be sure I’ll go back there soon for some naughty treat-like things that you don’t see anywhere else.   While there, I had a brunch of eggs hollandaise, which was ace. It was just that kind of day.

And then a continued walk down to the South Bank, meeting up with friends, having lunch, seeing the play (also excellent) and eventually walking back up to Euston and heading home.

A really enjoyable and utterly relaxed day, with 20km walked as a side benefit.