We arrive post Coronation, settling into a not so great hotel in Westminster supposedly close to everything but we end up taking Bolt taxis that are fairly cheap and friendly because it's further out from the centre than we thought. We find a lovely old pub for a drink before heading into the centre.
We’ve booked for a dinner at the Bentley Oyster bar, dating back to 1916. Everyone is friendly and we have the fish pie and fish and chips with a witlof, radicchio and pomegranate refreshing salad. It’s beyond extravagant but sometimes you just have to.
We’re off to the National Gallery and the city is heavily strung out with flags and weird cutouts of Charles and Camilla. We see an amazing Post Impressionist exhibition and a large amount of Titian’s paintings ending with an excellent piccolo and finishing at the Garrick Arms pub in Soho for a hearty fry up as only the British can do. Fried chicken, fried camembert and of course, the obligatory side of chips. It’s freezing and windy and we see Julia Gillard, our ex PM, rounding a corner.
Next day we go to the Tate for the Rossetis exhibition which, if you’re a Pre-Raphaelite fan as I am, you’d be blown away with the amount of paintings and poetry in one location. The Pre-raphaelites were a group of painters, poets and fabric designers in the 1850’s. The women who were muses, poets and painters are also included in this wonderful exhibition.We also see the huge amount of works by Turner and I fall in love with the small tiny paintings he did whilst travelling around Europe.
We change hotels for a night, so much better and with such lovely people running it compared to the other one and that night I go to Chelsea and discover the Ivy restaurants. Amazing. It’s only early but there’s only space at the bar and there I met a wonderfully eccentric woman and her equally eccentric friend. The first woman had a dance company that she ran and had just completed a month dancing herself on Wicked. The friend who came later was also into dance. She was organising some sort of performance at Buckingham Palace and asked me if I was in London tomorrow and if so, I must come!
I would be moving on but I was overwhelmed how they embraced me. I also fell in love with the bathroom! The whole place was amazing, like a quirky English parlour, full of colour, wallpaper, frames and velvet chairs.
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