Day eleven: 10 May: London and thence home

St Pancras station looks like this from the air.
Showering in my 'hotel' (I do not use the word advisedly) was entertaining, as I had no towel, and in all the excitement of seeing Anna and Kieran I had forgotten to buy one. Okay, and I'm too mean to spend the money. Katy has since pointed out that I slunk through Richmond without visiting her, so now I am in trouble with all John's daughters. I will make it up on my next visit, by which time there will be more grandchildren to admire. But I digress. I was about to have a shower. The shower cubicle I selected was in a room with a toilet, rather than in a room with another shower, because I was keen to shower alone. I placed my toileteries on the toilet seat, there not being anywhere else suitable to put them, and ventured inside the shower, carefully stepping over some old soap left by someone else. I remained calm in the face of adversity, telling myself that a shower was a clean place, so it didn't matter if someone dirty had been in before me. It was slightly reassuring to think that at least no-one would have peed (shouldn't there be another 'e'?) in the shower, as the toilet was so alarmingly handy. I had to hold the shower head in my hand, as when it sat in its holster the water aimed directly at the wall in such a way I couldn't seem to get between the wall and the water. So I held it with one hand and with the other attempted to reach the soaps and shampoos on the toilet seat and generally make myself squeaky clean. And when it was all over I dried myself on my sarong. I have had better cleansing experiences than this.

I can almost hear Hong Kong Kate giggling as she reads this....

After the showering fiasco I packed up my bag and started to skid it down the several flights of stairs. Not surprisingly, a young man appeared from nowhere and offered to carry it down. I could tell by the state of the carpet other people had called him this way. Where was he when I checked in I wondered. Then he charged me a quid to leave my bag there for a few hours while I inspected London. I locked both my bags and tried to look menacing rather than ripped off, but I don't know if I managed it.

Last time I visited London Anna gave me a nice Oyster card to use, so the day before I had bought one of my own, as part of my new independent adult identity. The way I read the instructions it had a daily cap of about seven quid, so I paid ten quid for it, but then had to top it up with another ten. Turns out if you don't swipe it properly it charges you the maximum journey cost. I have never had a cheap card that cost me so much before. Finally I realised I could top it up with my credit card (as I was running out of cash), and stopped worrying and started living. So I stuck twenty quid on it, and there I was, all over London with my Oyster card, swiping in and out of St Pancras, in and out of Kensington and in and out of everywhere else for that matter. It was marvellous. I love Oyster cards and I visited all the undergrounds stations I could, riding up and down the escalators and generally having a good subterranean time.

The funny thing about London is that there is no agreement about which side of the road to walk on, because although the cars drive on the left, on the tube (I am au fait with the local slang now) they stand on the right. I couldn't work out why I should stand on the right, but did as I was told, but when I got above ground I was quite flummoxed because there were no instructions, and people were walking all over the place. I decided to walk down the middle.

I visited a church in St Pancras in case my ancestors' names were in the cemetery. One of these days I will get a surprise and actually find an ancestral name in a churchyard. My mother was a Browne, and so was her father and his father before him, who was born in Stepney, which is in Hackney (i.e. not St Pancras). But it was fascinating looking around the Eurostar station and seeing people arrive from France with their bagettes and cans of snails. It made me hungry, so I bought some wonderfully hot and strong coffee and some porridge at a Pret a Manger, which was one of the few places I could find a decent gluten-free breakfast.

Then I inspected Hammersmith where I used to live in Biscay Road, and where I heard Jethro Tull and Joan Armatrading play at the Odeon (not on the same day though) in the seventies. Let me just say now that the seventies were great, and if you are old you will agree, and if you are young you are probably listening to the seventies music, and still agree. Then I took the tube to St James Park and took the Birdcage walk to inspect Buckingham Palace, just after the morning guards had gone for an early lunch. There were all kinds of film crews and police around, so I guess they knew I was coming. Feeling a bit resentful, I swept my red cape around my shoulders, put my head down so they wouldn't recognise me, and wandered into the midst of it all. I avoided the horses by staying close to the fence. Turns out (as I discovered later) that Mr Brown (not my relative) had popped in to see the Queen and tell her he was leaving Downing Street because no-one had voted for him (sour grapes I guess), and Mr Cameron, just 40 minutes later, was on her doorstep offering to take over the reins of the country. Pshaw. If the British used MMP instead of FPP they might have had a government that had actually represented what the people wanted. As it is, they now have a well hung parliament, which on reflection is not such a bad thing for the British, and I'm sure it hasn't happened before.

All the excitement was making me tired, so I walked to Hyde Park corner to see Apsley House, which didn't really grab me (luckily), and then wandered around Park Lane and up towards the National Art Gallery near Trafalgar Square. Actually I can't remember exactly where I went, but I was getting pretty knackered, and my pedometer was showing about 30,000 steps, but I do recall going past where I had my first ever coffee and cake after a movie, somewhere near Park Lane, and noted that it was now a Starbucks. Eventually I staggered into the art gallery and up to Seurat's Bathers, but there were too many people with the same idea for me to enjoy myself. I took in a couple of old time favourites such as Picasso's Child with a Dove but I was just too tired. All that rice risotto at Horsley Park had left me in a protein deficit state and now I couldn't even walk around London. So I took a tube back to the hostel, got my bags, and went to Heathrow to unwind. I had a plane to catch and movies to watch.

After several hours of writing postcards, drinking tea, and recharging everything that could be recharged, I headed to the Emirates departure lounge to wait for my flight.

Here is how I knew I was nearly home: there was a guy strumming his guitar in the departure lounge of the flight to Sydney, women without make-up, and and ordinary looking people with faces like relatives heading home. I was very happy to be going with them.