The first experience I want to tell you about is showering at King's Cross station. Already quite a shady prospect in and of itself, to my mind, this is made shadier by the fact that to avail yourself of this amenity, you have to go to the Left Luggage and slip them a fiver. They then give you a ticket, which you give to the security guards at the toilets, who hand you a suspect towel and a bottle of shower gel stolen from a hotel. They then lead you to a featureless door and let you into a room with no shower curtain, no raking, no screen, indeed no method at all of keeping the water from going wherever it damn well pleases and a showerhead on one of the walls. There was just a motion detector with which to summon or dispel the flow of water- no control over the volume dispelled, certainly no way to alter the temperature. I asked the security guard if there was a time limit and she blinked at me as if I'd asked where I might go to contract smallpox in this fair city. She left and I got down to the main event- scalding myself, soaking my clothes and getting soap in my eyes; exactly the state you wish to be in when attending a job interview.
I returned the towel, pocketed the shower gel and tried to decide if I actually felt any fresher. And then headed off for my interview.
I won't bore you with the details of a job interview, but I will bore you with the details of my visit to Hamleys. I went there to unwind after the interview, on the suggestion of my mother, and was very disappointed to find out that toy trains are no longer in vogue. How else can you explain the downsizing? When I was young, I remember I loved the Hamleys toy train track- it was massive and ran the length around the two staircases between floors- there were at least four different trains on it, running at different speeds. It was marvellous. There was one track, smaller than what they'd laid out for the Scalectrix (Scalectrix, really, I mean, honestly). I didn't even bother to photograph it. Out of anger, I broke a toy car by driving it straight into a wall (this was an act of defiance and not just sheer clumsiness, I swear) and then left. Well, maybe I stopped by the lego first. And the UFOs. And the bubble machines. But then I marched straight out to meet Patrick.
Normally when I see Patrick a lot of time has elapsed since our last rendez-vous, because, like everyone else in my life, I seem to only be in the same country as him twice a year, but this time we'd seen each other twice within a month and so it felt a lot more relaxed. We retired to the UCL Scandinavian Studies common room with some crisps and cider and chewed the cud. It was lovely.
What was not lovely was the hostel I was staying in, as I discovered after I left Patrick to go there. It was only £29 for three nights, which I accept should have been something of a warning; still, there was no pillow, they hadn't changed the sheet or washed the duvet cover despite the previous occupant apparently having had a nosebleed or maybe haemorrhaged to death right there in the bunk, and left quite the stain on the bedding. I was also staying with the long-termers which is always an awkward situation because you are essentially paying to stay in someone's bedroom (and usually someone with none-too-great-a-life, if you're honest). The window was broken and there was no ladder to get up to the upperbunks, and, perhaps most stomach churning of all, there was no toilet paper. Anywhere. It was not a nice place, is what I'm saying. Still, what a bargain!
Next up was a day with Poppy- and it was fantastic. We ate pancakes, went to the science museum, where we we drank at 11 in the morning and coloured in the children's placemats
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(apparently, there are also exhibits- I certainly didn't see any), went to the Victoria and Albert museum where we looked at the tea rooms and then left (yet again, not a single artifact on display), then went to Covent Gardens, where we drank some more, then to the apple shop where we dragged clumsy ninja around by his ankle for an hour and then to see Shakespeare in Love at the Noel Coward Theatre. I haven't seen Poppy since September and we immediately fell back into our old pitter-patter of random insults, deeply personal truths and non-sequiturs. In total, we spent more than twelve hours just the two of us together- I don't think I've spent that much time all at once and one-on-one with someone for years. But it felt amazing.
The next day, I went to see Whiplash (Oh, English language cinemas, how I've missed you!) and then met up with David of David K. Barnes fame. We met at the National Theatre, which felt very posh but was a lot less expensive in terms of drinks than other places in London. We laughed, chatted and exchanged theatrical anecdotes in just the right setting for doing so.
After this, I went to see The Play that Goes Wrong at the Duchess Theatre, which was extremely funny. But it did trigger a slight bit of PTSD (Post Theatrical Stress Disorder) in me, especially a scene where an actor spectacularly failed to untie a ribbon on an important document, which mirrored an earlier incident in my own life: during Oh My God in The Ten Minuters, I was completely unable to unwrap a shovel from its sheathing blanket and had to hand it to Alex, my co-star, who got it off in a matter of seconds. Very embarassing.
The next day was bissected by my flight in the afternoon, so I couldn't really do anything with the time, sadly. I mulled around a bit, returned to the Science Museum, nearly caused a security incident by accidentally leaving my bag under a bench and then left. Pretty standard, really.
Still, the weekend in total was an absolute blast and really makes me think I should visit the captial more often- it's expensive and exhausting, yes, but also exhilirating, experiential and exciting.
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