From Eat to Egypt

7 June 2008
London

It's official - Maurn and Maurice have hit London. Big time. Not as big time as the new Sex and the City movie or a Biblical plague of raining frogs, but enough to know that they're back - and they've got the wide eyes and blistered heels to prove it.

After a couple of days of overcast weather, we had a gloriously sunny morning, and after a few amusing moments where Dad wandered into the living room mid-way through my morning yoga routine, sat on the couch and turned on the Sports channel, we headed off to see London. Mum commented that my neighbourhood was so relaxed and leafy and suburban that she didn't really feel like we were in the Big Smoke, so off we went to find it.

We headed to Borough Market near London Bridge station, where there's been a food market on and off since the days of the Ancient Romans, and now taken over by middle-class foodies like Bryan, and yummy mummies with pushchairs wandering around with sunglasses drawling "Yup... yup... yup" into their cellphones. Since the rise of celebrity chefs and the "green food" market, Borough has become massively popular, and they sell incredibly yummy and overpriced-but-worth-it fruit, vegies, fish, meat, cheese, cakes, bread and coffee.



Mum got hit on by an Italian woman from Genoa (you can see her in the photo above, in between Mum and Dad) who offered some olives the size of duck eggs, marinaded in paprika oil, garlic and mushrooms, which was love at first sight. Then I queued for 15 minutes to get a £2 latte (it was worth it) and we headed off down past Clink Street (home of the infamous prison from which the term "the clink" was coined) and onto the South Bank.

You know you're back in London when you see St Pauls Cathedral, and we took a stroll along the riverside, passing Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and into the Tate Modern (an old powerstation turned into a modern art gallery) for a coffee at their cafe. Dad was pleased to see we saved 10% on our cups of tea with my Tate Members' card.



Then we cranked up gears and continued down the riverside, passing the Oxo Tower (site of a truly great restaurant dinner I had with Bryan and Karley last year) and onto the National Theatre and Royal Festival Hall. These resoundingly ugly 1960s concrete block monoliths have been given a facelift in the last year - the grimness of the concrete has been softened with a glass portico, there's now a large balcony area where you can suck back a vino looking at the Embankment, the footpaths have been widened and there's now a chain of groovy restaurants and cafes to tempt the punters before and after theatre and music shows. We settled on EAT, a chain store of flash fast food, and Mum and Dad munched through a ham and cheese panini and two incredibly weak cups of tea.



Then we headed over Hungerford Bridge to "North of the River" and to central London itself. We took the Tube up to Tottenham Court Road (Dad managed the stairs manfully) and strolled down Great Russell Street to the British Museum, where we had a coffee with my friend David, and revisited one of our favourite places - the Egyptian exhibit.

Looking up close at massive statues of pharoahs, lion-goddesses, the odd sarcophagus (flash word for coffins) and sphinxes makes you marvel at the brilliance of the Egyptians' engineering skills, and the cunning of the British who managed to steal half of Egypt's relics and deposit them in the British Museum. Almost as impressive are the massive winged bearded statues of the Assyrians - which, given that Assyria is now in modern-day Iraq, it's probably just as well that they were purloined and smuggled to Blighty.



Mum and Dad were in raptures, and we then took another quick look at the Elgin Marbles, the amazing Greek statues and bas reliefs which the British Government are, rather controversially, giving back to the Greek government.

Then I made a rather bold suggestion - rather than head straight home, I had the bright idea of walking down Charing Cross Road to see Trafalgar Square in the late afternoon sunlight. Somehow, the idea of walking down one of central London's busiest streets on a Saturday afternoon was slightly less fun than it seems, but Mum and Dad were great troupers, and were wide-eyed at all the people around, which Mum said was "more people than I've ever seen before in my life". After a restorative coffee at Pret a Manger, we headed to Trafalgar Square, which was Mum and Dad's back yard on their last trip, as their hotel was behind the Square, and we took in the freshly refurbed St Martins-in-the-Fields, Nelson's Column, Big Ben in the distance, and tens of thousands of Spanish exchange students lolling around on the stairs in front of the National Gallery. It was fantastic, and truly a feeling - as I always have when I'm there, even five years on - that I'm back in London. Here they are:



We headed back to leafy suburbia, picked up some haddock for dinner, and despite having a slight disaster with the rice had a pleasant dinner and a sensibly early night. I'm sending them to church tomorrow to pray for my sins, and having a quieter day at home so Dad can rest his legs in time for Vienna.

Here's my favourite photo of Mum and Dad from today, in Trafalgar Square with the National Gallery in the background - their smiles say it all, I think. I've been in London so long that I sometimes forget how amazing it is, how eye-popping the range of foods and buildings and people are, and how much fun it can be to be a tourist here, so I'm glad to rediscover that sense of fun and wonder with them.