As pre-arranged the evening before we got up as usual and journalled and devoted before our son arose at 830am and ate a full English breakfast enjoying the English bacon,
“Second only to none…” he said, tucking in appreciatively.
This is a summary of unplanned Day Two.
We walked to the station, dry but under cloud, our son had strapped his Go Pro, a camera that could be programmed to take a photo every so many seconds, onto his head like a miner’s headlamp. He had set it to five seconds. We are super parents and comments made about the camera went something like this,
“…an art student!”
“..must be doing a film project.”
We shrugged on the artist personas and journeyed on ignoring the peculiar looks we drew.
He and his camera were treated to crowded tube trains, tunnels and escalators and I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a photo of him taking hundreds of photos.
When we emerged at the station it was raining so the camera had to go, packed inside another camera bag with a waterproof cover.
He’d captured an hour of film in 5 second increments.
At the Old Bailey we were told we could not take in the umbrella, the backpack, containing harmless crisps and sandwiches, or the cameras. I knew this but we thought there was a place we could safely store these items,
“The cafe has closed down,” we were told.
I volunteered to take all the forbidden items and find somewhere to have a cuppa. Hubs looked at me in fear as I have a tendency to wander off never to be seen again.
“I promise I’ll return in an hour,” I said.
What I did is not important, I returned and heard all about the trial they had sat in on. Someone had set a family member on fire in their bed and killed them. Grim stuff and wigs to boot.
We were close to St. Pauls’ Cathedral,
so in we went in for our lunch which we ate in the large refectory for this purpose down in the crypt.
We walked around the cathedral and our son took a panoramic,
and snapped the ceiling,
twice,
and was genuinely interested in Nelson and Wellington and the standards born by Field Marshalls in the various countries where they were fighting for Commonwealth causes.
We caught a bus, in the pouring rain, huddled at the stop under hubs’ one umbrella.
We met our youngest daughter, fresh off the train from Leigh, at Tower Hill where we took the historic presence of the Tower of London casually for granted, dodging the tourists keen for the shot of ages.
We shared some of our daughter’s luggage and hopped on the tube again to Westminster and the Churchill War Rooms.
We took photographs of Big Ben from a different angle,
and the habitual one of a phone booth!
Then we walked along Parliament Street and turned left onto King Charles Street where I used to post all my letters from boarding school to my parents in Beirut.
This is where the diplomatic bag left from!
This is where my father worked when he wasn’t abroad. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
My father used to eat his lunch in St. James’s Park at the end of the road.
here we found Churchill’s War Rooms,
which were very interesting and rendered hugely exceptional by the almost immediate sighting of Eric Bana who refused to admit it,
“Excuse me, aren’t you Eric Banner?” asked fearless daughter inspired by our fearless World War II leader, Churchill. He looked at her and smiled,
“Not today,” and walked off with his plain little family in tow.
Spoiled sport!
After a soggy walk and train ride and soggier walk home we dried off quickly and then went around the corner to the local with Kathy, our friend from upstairs.
He and his sister made fun of a puppy pug who was too young to be in a pub really, but didn’t care.
Followed by fish and chips there endeth the second unplanned day.
We decided when we would get up on unplanned Day Three and retired to our respective beds.
Well hello there! My name is Vivienne McNeny.
I am an empty nester exploring life as a Boomer…you could say I'm happily Boomering along!
As a homeschooling Mum I have finally quit the job of role model and mentor to my four children. I do what I want to do, eat when I feel like it, enjoy life with my blue eyed cowboy and clean my house once a month or so whether it needs it or not!
In true English form I write about the emergence of my true identity now that I can no longer hide behind my children as their Mum.
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