UK10: MONDAY 15TH MARCH

Thanks again to D for writing this up!

I opened my eyes to see sunshine outside and was so surprised that I shouted out “It’s daylight!” and was henceforth wide awake. A full 7 hours sleep! That was the first time in 5 nights that we’d slept in the same bed for two nights in a row. Went down to breakfast with M after baths, and took advantage of the buffet. Other revellers from the wedding turned up at various points through the morning, including D’s nephews T and Y. T was running around, pretending to cover everyone with poo and wee. Ah, to be 3 again!

People began dispersing, and eventually, we were the last remaining. We had 4 hours or so to kill before our allotted slot for the Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy Of Arts on the other side of the city, so we decided to go for a bit of a wander, and walked passed Smithfield Market, down along the Thames, up the Strand, pointedly ignored Australia House, went by the “Happy-Go-Lucky Funeral Parlour” (yes, really), and into Covent Garden.







It is poor form, we have decided, to go to Covent Garden and not visit the Transport Museum’s excellent shop. So we did. The main reason for going to Covent Garden was to actually to visit our friend U in his café Kafe Neo (Greek for Coffee Shop, we learnt). It was very busy when we arrived (which is a good thing), but we managed to get a table and even to steal a few moments with the workaholic owner (Sunday had been his first day off work in over a month).





Our aching feet decided for us that we were not going to walk to Piccadilly for the exhibition, so we ventured Underground and emerged in Green Park, where we spent 20 minutes walking up and down the Burlington Arcade (http://www.burlington-arcade.co.uk/main.php?id=1). [Editor’s note: D refused to buy me all kinds of hideous and hideously expensive things! Not fair!] We then headed to the very good Van Gogh exhibition. The exhibition includes letters from Van Gogh (mainly to his brother), sketches and studies and his attempts at watercolour as well has the luscious oil paintings for which he is so famous. It was arranged mostly chronologically, and it was fun to see how bad some of his early work was – gives hope to the rest of us, I think! The exhibition was well hung (heh!), with bright walls in colours taken from the works displayed. It was only 7 rooms (tightly packed with people), which made the entire exhibition manageable, even with sore feet. Whilst waiting for M&A to leave the exhibition, J&D waited on the staircase of the Royal Academy in between statues of a very effeminate Gainsborough and an extraordinarily butch Turner.


This amused me no end - J

After a recuperative cuppa at Napket (which was a nice place to sit, but food was overpriced and bland), we jumped into a taxi, returned to the hotel, picked up our luggage, then took another taxi, through peak-hour London traffic, back home. We all collapsed, exhausted and exhausted and exhausted.