Of course, this meant that the Monday turned into the warmest day of the year with beautiful blue skies and an English Channel that didn’t look like it was 43% human feces.

So these are phone photos. But Brighton is cute and fun and I can’t wait for Phil to get his act together and move into a permanent home down there with a spare bedroom.

I just can’t escape the feeling that the Victorians didn’t really understand what a beach was for. So rather than lying in the (rare) warmth, they built large wooden structures out over the water which they walked along; fully clothed; and once they got to the end bought spun sugar and jellied eels. Then risked their lives in highly flammable novelty machines.

Off season holiday destinations are, however, my new favourite thing. There is so much pathos in looking at the naked bones of a structure that is designed to force large crowds of people to have fun.

This would have been a longer post but -once again- phone photos. Kinda ruins the magic. Although, I will say that the camera in the Nokia E71 is good. It is absolutely the only good thing about this phone. Do not buy this fucking phone!

Let’s begin at the beginning.

Megan’s on half-term at the moment and I certainly don’t have anything going on so we arranged to meet on Friday morning at Embankment to entertain ourselves with a little walking tour called ‘Eccentric London‘.

The tour was due to start at 11am so we arranged to meet at 10:20ish, have coffee, and bitch about those of you we both know. I get there bang on 10:20am and immediately start sending ‘funny’ texts about how I’m totally going to leave because Megan hasn’t shown up.

And then she continues to not show up. I busy myself taking phone photos of police horses. It gets much closer to 11am. The tour group begins gathering around the front of Embankment Station.

I loiter just outside the group but still within earshot, even though I am terrified of looking like one of those cheapskates that follows tours around but technically aren’t part of them because they want to save a measly seven pounds. (Note: I’ve never actually seen someone do this but it is a genuine phobia of mine. I particularly hate it when tour groups swarm around me in museums/historical sites and I inadvertently get some “free tour information”. It’s awkward and I tend to move on to the next exhibit/site much earlier than I intended to.)

Anyway, I am also within earshot of the tube loudspeaker, which continues to announce that there are “severe delays on the Piccadilly Line”. The thing is, a tube only has to be five minutes behind schedule before it constitutes a “severe delay” so I was optimistic Megan would still make it. (By then I had guessed she was on the Piccadilly Line. Either that or dead. I texted her a joke about this and mentioned that I don’t actually know her mother’s phone number so I’m not going to be much help. But then neither is the text message, when you think about it.)

11am came and went -and so did the tour group. And then twelve minutes later (twelve!) Megan shows up, apologising profusely. Or she might have been swearing profusely. Whatever, it was profuse and she had been trapped in a metal box underground for half an hour and I didn’t really mind anyway.

Her first suggestion of somehow “catching up” with the group was immediately dismissed. Firstly: lame. And secondly: it’s half term and I was there long enough to see at least ten different walking tours/European school groups go past and I didn’t fancy playing “are you my mother” whenever we saw someone with a flag standing in front of a crowd of people.

Plus neither of us had been here so that was our Plan B:

Westminster Abbey is actually just a couple of blocks upriver and the day was supposed to be about being tourists in our adopted city so it would do just nicely.

However, as previously mentioned: half term. Also it was getting on for midday when tourist sites are at their busiest. Sure enough there was a queue. We joined it. I kept our spot while Megan wandered along to make sure we were in the right queue. This is Britain, you see, and there are lots of queues. I’d hate to have to stand in line for forty five minutes only to arrive at a counter where we would be forced to register our civil partnership or something.

She came back with bad news. It was fifteen pounds entry fee. That’s more than two walking tours! After briefly discussing whether it was feasible to borrow someone’s kids so we can get in on a reduced rate (leaving small children unattended in a church, what could go wrong?) we opted to bail and take the “walking tour option” -ie walk around the outside of the building like the cheap Australian scum we are.

This option led us straight into the gift shop. Sure, we hadn’t been inside the abbey but I could still buy a tea-towel or mousepad of the place, right?

Turns out, no. We emerged empty handed. Although, Megan may go back for those playing cards she had her eye on.

So if you’re keeping score of the day so far:

1) Walking Tour: Fail

2) Westminster Abbey: Fail

3) Westminster Abbey Gift Shop: Fail

My suggestion was for visiting the Imperial War Museum which was to be our activity for the Saturday. No harm in bringing it up to Friday? Good. It’s agreed.

So off we go back along the District Line to South Kensington where you “alight here for museums”. Which we did.

Only to find the platform was a zombie swarm of people trying to get up the stairs and -presumably- into the museums. I’d never seen it like this and the District Line is the tube line I use the most -what with living along it, and all.

So before the doors to our train had closed, we made another snap judgement. Megan has never been to Richmond which is where this train terminates. (It’s waaay out. It’s not even technically in London.) But I know this cute little pub on the river where old people and geese congregate and by the time we get there it will be lunch.

With that, we leapt back into our carriage, leaving the last few pieces of the dignity we’d packed for the day back on the busy platform.

We went here -except there were more geese on Friday.

In fact, this is the spot where we invented “Megan and Gordon’s Anti-Riot Technology for London 2012 Olympics”. (Patent pending, patent pending, patent pending.)

The technology? Geese.

Fuck this ‘mounted police’ shit. Just use geese. Release them in the direction of the angry mob. Ain’t nobody going near that. Aren’t they supposed to make really good/delicious guard dogs? This is basically the same thing.

So the sun was out, which meant we sat by the river yammering until it instantly got extremely cold. The nachos were average and scarily quick. (And I mean scary. We had sat down for maybe ninety seconds before they arrived.)

Anyway, it was a great afternoon but unfortunately, as a day designed to provide an alternative activity to simply sitting in a pub for hours like we always do, it failed completely. Unless you count the fact that we sat outside.

Saturday was going to be better.

Saturday

Saturday was better. It was touch and go for a few seconds in the morning when I was very tempted to cancel -having gone out drinking with former work colleagues the night before.

But no! The Somewhere Else London Walking Tour needed me, probably. Plus I had been waiting to use up all the Simpson’s quotes relating to walking, tours and relevant entertainment that I had compiled for Friday. There are quite a lot of them:

- “This is better than a movie, how?!”

- “I’ll have you know, I wandered away from the tour!”

- “I had no idea history was so filthy/lot’s of prostitutes there”

- Miming taking a suicide pill the second I’m asked to walk anywhere.

On the tube ride in, part of me actually hoped that Megan was somehow delayed again. If only to make for a funnier story. I prepared some Simpson’s quotes for that eventuality, as well. (“I’ll go a little later, I’ll go a little later.”)

Much to my extreme disgust, this was not the case. She was already there, drinking coffee like a jerk.

I ordered a coffee.

The tour got underway, hosted by a former zookeeper -which gave me a couple of extra quotes. (“Zookeeper! Zookeeper!”)

Continuing the string of failures, we find out along the way that the Imperial War Museum we were planning to visit yesterday is, in fact, in South London and easy walking distance from where the tour concluded. Please note this is several miles and one large river from where I forced Megan to go on Friday. Dodged a bullet there. (Little war humour for you. What? War humour is totally a thing.)

Now, I’m not going to say much about the actual content of the tour because it was awesome and it’s not my intellectual property. But I have linked to their site twice and I really recommend you take one if you are/are going to be in town. There are also no photos because we basically just crossed the river, wandered along the Thames and then went for a stroll through Lambeth before ending up out the front of the Old Vic Theatre. The value of the tour is not in the sights you see but the way in which you see them.

And this is what is so wonderful about London. It’s something that Megan and I remarked on over lunch at a pub that was one of the sights on the tour and the home of possibly the best veggie burger in the city. You can basically run a tour like this anywhere within zones 1 or 2. It may not reference lavender men or Charlie Chaplin but wherever you look there are layers upon layers of story -you can get drunk on it. Just today I found out that the park outside my tube stop was apparently the sight of a pitched battle with Cromwell. It is an amazing feeling to live here -to be part of an enormous narrative stretching back ten thousand years -it makes you feel like a tiny fish in a gigantic, purposeful ocean.

London rocks. Even if you spend two days failing at trying to see exactly how it does so. Yes, yes. The moral of the story is that you technically can’t fail at exploring London. We all saw that coming.

In other news, Megan lost an earring somewhere on Waterloo Bridge. So, if you see it, please just email me. The details are on the About Page.

Yorkshire. In February.

And not just February. It was officially The Week When Everything Is Closed. Yorvik -which only closes for three days every year- was closed for our three days in York. The Captain Cook Museum in Whitby? Closed. Whitby Abbey? (As seen/read in Dracula.) Closed.

Who do I blame for this? Well, me. Things have to close for maintenance and I’m sure the various managements were thinking “only a true psychopath or someone who has made a string of very poor choices in their life would ever dream of a driving holiday in Yorkshire the week before February mid-term. Let’s close.”

Well, screw you jerks! I qualify under both those assumptions. It was settled, then! A driving holiday we were to have.

Warwickshire

Warwickshire isn’t actually in Yorkshire… It’s in Warwickshire. But we were setting out from Bristol having caught up with a few friends the night before and we needed somewhere halfway-ish.

It’s not really half way but it does have a couple of really nice castles and we got to stay in the attic a 400 year old former pub. The door into our (carpeted) bathroom was only thirty inches high. You can sort of see a photo of it here but not really. I took this from the actual toilet so at the time I was… Otherwise engaged.

No such problem with the castles, though. But we did get snow whilst at Warwick Castle.

Snow! On battlements of an actual castle! It’s what every little boy dreams of when he is young and imagining himself in one of those weird pointy princess hats with the frilly shit hanging off them that you sometimes see in The Wizard of Id.

The photos of the more ruined castle are actually Kenilworth Castle -just a few miles down the road and a preferable destination for a number of reasons.

Not only did I recognise some of names involved (Robert Dudley, Elizabeth I – it was probably a sex nest) but -unlike Warwick Castle- it wasn’t filled with creepy wax statues of people from the late 1800s and also King Henry VIII for some reason.

It also did not employ actors. Horrible, horrible actors chasing you round the great hall wanting to engage with you. Repeatedly. You can see them in a couple of the above photos. This strikes me as an unusual “attraction” for England. You see, most of the English seize up in terror at the prospect of possibly having to speak to people just in the course of their normal day. I’m sure almost half of them would be catatonic after being forced into verbal sparring with our particular ‘wigged buffoon’.

The French high school group, on the other hand, loved them/teased them mercilessly. It was cute.

I should mention I’m not impugning their actual acting skills. They were fine. In fact, the ‘buffoon’ in particular really belongs in the big leagues. I’m seeing Mickey or Goofy somewhere in his future. He may, however, want to stop referring to his penis every time someone asks about a sword on the wall.

The castles also instilled a bit of a Marxist revolution in me. Now, I’m usually way too lazy/apathetic to accept crude political explanations of history but fuck this.

You stand at the top of the tower and look out for miles around. All of it owned by a solitary fat fuck downstairs. Then you go down into the ’state rooms’ and have to hear about how he imported French wall paper and liked to talk about it while some schmuck is ‘drawing his bath’. French fucking wallpaper?! These farmers out there live worse than their pigs! They paid for your fucking wallpaper you fuck! It made me oddly angry that there was this almost fawning modern interest in -for instance- the design choices of these absurd prats as if nothing else of note ever happened in the past.

People complain that stones from these ancient monuments have been carted away over the centuries for reuse as cobbles and pig sties.

Good. As far as I’m concerned, it was their stone in the first place.

There was also a wax statue of one of the Earls of Warwick who was also apparently the Viceroy of India. There was a wax statue of one of the royals in the green room with him ‘discussing the affairs of state’. That made me sick. A pointless Warwickshire freeloader was -for a time- running one of the world’s great civilisations on the other side of the planet. Explain that to me.

Democracy is actually awesome. This is what I learned from wax statues.

Whitby

Okay, let me just say this and get it out of the way. I love Whitby. Love like I would actually live there if it had anything in the way of media jobs. (Well… There’s always the Whitby Gazette.)

It’s ominous and blasted and haunted and Lovecraftian.

The Captain Cook Museum was closed. So instead we walked through the old town and drank at a pub right by the sea that has been going since the 1600s. That means the chances that we were drinking in a pub that he drank in were about 100%. (If you can’t tell, I’m a bit of a Cook nerd.)

On the way through, we also stopped at the Hole of Horcum. Fun fact, this only placed 11th on the list of Britain’s 100 Rudest Place Names -which tells you something about the winner. (Gropecunt Lane, if you’re wondering.)

York

York also rocked. For some reason I don’t quite understand but I’m sure someone does -it wasn’t bombed as heavily as London, Coventry, Bristol, blah blah blah. Presumably it has something to do with not being an industrial town?

Whatevs. It just means that the old town is an absolute fairy tale. Overhanging buildings, cobbled streets, haunted pubs. By and large it manages to avoid the Disneyland fakeness because the buildings are actually in modern use -ie we saw a dental surgery in one of the lovely old, uneven wooden buildings. They’re not just filled with eponymous gift/fudge/sweet/christmas ornament shops. (Though they were certainly around.)

Oh, and I discovered the existence of a creepy and unironic subset of glamour photography: period photography. Check. This. Out. You can just make out the outline of my head in between those of the ‘happy couple’. Which is exactly where it belongs. I’m still on the fence as to whether or not I approve of these guys actually breeding. I either really love the idea of it or am totally against it.

The drive back to London was three and a bit hours. My GOD this place is small! I really want a car. It means I could potentially go anywhere I want on a Saturday morning whim.

Or maybe I just miss buying terrible junk food from gas stations. Because that also happened.

If you’re wondering, the best way to safeguard against this is a cloud computing.

1. Get a Pro Flickr account for all your photos (Facebook won’t do. It technically owns the copyright to your photos and also compresses them -meaning you will have shit photos if you ever try to print them out). Unlimited, high-res storage.
2. Sort yourself out with some online storage for any particularly valuable music files. (Also note iTunes has contingencies for loss of files so if they’re legal be sure to check their site).

‘Backing up files’ physically with external hard drives is both more expensive and less effective. Whatever can happen to your laptop can also happen to your hard drive. Plus this isn’t 1998 you backward jerks.

Flickr also lets you do fun, awesome easy things like this. Behold! Gothenburg.

You may remember my little trip from late last year? The one where I went mushrooming and ruined Ellen’s party? Here are the photos. Gothenburg rocks somewhat. It’s got an actual purpose which is more than I can say for Stockholm -it bored me. The people are more fun and the place is less sterile. Go there. It made it onto the Times of London’s ‘Top 10 2010 City Breaks’.

Next on the list: Rome – in pieces. Just be sure to check out ‘Around Rome’ (first slideshow). The remaining sets are -ahem- comprehensive in their study of the places we went.

Next up is the set from The Vatican and St Paul’s. Warning: contains images of the Pope. And some kind of painting of a shoe fight with a cardinal. (I really wish I had the time AT the time to blog about Rome.)

The rest of the Rome images can be found in sets on the Sets Page. (Funnily enough.) If you visit you may also note that I only take some of my own advice. Much of my photo collection is still stored dangerously in iPhoto and no where else.

Last but not least -because mine is clearly the first ever travel blog anywhere in the world- I can only assume my little brother and his girlfriend got the idea from me. So I’m sending him a fraction of my tiny traffic and some all important link love. Subscribe. He’s funny. Besides, I may cameo in it toward the end of the year if everything goes according to plan. Here’s a bit about them.

You see, I’ve been catching up on some documentary viewing (shark related, of course) and spending a lot of time messing about on the ol’ laptop.

And what I don’t get is why there are no great white sharks in Britain despite the fact it has Europe’s largest seal population. Here is the great white’s range:

So it’s found in the Western Mediterranean and the north coast of Spain but won’t swim just that little bit further up?

Onto the next map. Below is the median ocean surface temperature for the whole world.

Now, the colour you want to pay the most attention to is green. According to Wikipedia (ha!), great whites are found in waters ranging from 12 – 25 degrees centigrade.

This bears out because you can see that it’s green all around New Zealand, Southern Australia and South Africa where the average temperature is 12 – 16 degrees.

It is also green all around the entire British Isles. Where there is an abundance of shark food. And yet so far there have been no confirmed sightings or encounters.

Which isn’t to say there haven’t been rumoured encounters. Behold this unverified yet professionally reenacted account from the BBC a couple of years ago.

All I can come up with is that there just aren’t enough people using the water recreationally in Britain (for a number of very good reasons). But this isn’t the case, at all. If anything, the overcrowded beaches are getting even more use because the economy is in the toilet and people are opting for staycations.

Maybe it’s the visibility? But then that would suggest that whilst the chances of sightings may be lower, the chances of encounters should be higher -given that great whites prefer surprise predation in dark or murky water.

Page two of this Nat Geo article makes the point that it’s more of an oddity that great whites aren’t encountered in British waters rather than rare and unverified sightings. In fact, it looks like a number of shark authorities are officially extending the animal’s range up to Scotland.

But then if this truly is part of their range and given the huge amount of commercial fishing that has gone on in UK waters over the last fifty years, why hasn’t a single specimen turned up as bycatch?

I’ve got a few seaside snorkelling adventures planned for this summer so maybe I’ll let you know? If it’s not this season, it will certainly be soon, as this article would suggest.

On a related matter, I also think that Australia is significantly under-reporting the number of fatal shark attacks each year (some of the 100+ drownings may well be attacks) but I need to get better at conditional probability first.

Oh yeah, I’m teaching myself basic probability, Italian and brushing up on my French. It’s been raining for days, what else is there to do? I choose to view ‘cabin fever’ as an ‘opportunity’.

I’m not entirely sure why Paula is gesticulating like Stalin in the above photo. If memory serves it was actually more of a helicopter motion than stern finger pointing. Either way, Megan is clearly not all that impressed. Alex seems okay with it.

Anyway, the day and evening were super awesome with super awesome company. I’d go into it in more detail but I really want to tell you what we ate, instead. (It DID take me fucking days to complete so, you know, go with it.)

- Homemade chili jam with the cheese and pate course. This stuff is legendary. The whole jar went. Good thing we made seven.

- Maple roast turkey that had been soaking in brine outside for days. See this video for a more glamorous/fictional account of how it’s done. It starts at the one minute mark but -to be honest- if you’re reading this then you clearly have enough time to watch the whole thing. This blog isn’t exactly breaking news, is it?

- Mother’s homemade bread sauce with the added improvement of using a food processor to crumble the bread, rather than standing around like OCD orphans ripping it into little pieces. This was the first experience of bread sauce for a couple of the guests and it was referred to as “the shizz”.

- Maple roast parsnip and butternut squash. Homemade cranberry sauce. Stuffing and gravy a la M&S. See previous post.

- Bacon wrapped chipolatas. This appears to be a very English thing so I thought I’d try it last year. I have since found out my paternal grandmother used to make it at Christmas time so I’ve got a nice family connection to it. This is good because they are AWESOME.

- Fancy pants honey/mustard ham served cold because I had the presence of mind to cook it on Christmas Eve. There’s only one oven, after all.

Here’s a photo slideshow of the day in question. Most of the images are of food prep taken with a phone because I was/am immensely proud of the whole spread. It is exactly as interesting as it sounds.

Though, it might be worth it just to see what a raw turkey looks like soaking outside in the rain, weighed down with a spade wrapped in a plastic bag. (Told you the video was more glamorous.)

That’s the lot, kids. Happy New Year, all!

The document in question originated from the general Dalston area and was penned by this man, who apparently specialises in stereotypical fiction. (The BEST kind of fiction.)

To be honest, it’s not going to be all that circular. It’s just a blog post listing random things that have happened in the recent-ish past.

The year began for us both in Bristol, with me working for the BBC. That’s right… That whole adventure wasn’t even a year ago. Gordon moved back into London to spend more time devoted to his abiding passion for sharks by working at Discovery Channel. The initial shame of living in West London eventually wore off as he realised how easy it was to walk to work and how close he was to museums and many delightfully middle class shops.

So began five months of alternate weekends in Bristol and London for Gordon and James. This was unbelievably tiring but had the benefit of never being more than a fortnight away from a Bath Ale. We also both became very familiar with the Victoria Bus Station which will come in handy if we are ever homeless and need somewhere to sleep rough. (You have to pay to use the toilets but they’re cleaner than the ones in the pub across the road. They’d be easier to wash the heroin sweat off your face in.)

From May, we had a couple of months of fortuitous timing as a dear friend of mine from Australia (Megan… Something.) began her London adventure by living in what became my library.

James moved back into London at about this time and took a job with an M&S that was literally at the end of the street we used to live on in Islington. That’s what you call ironic, Alanis.

Having finally received my passport back, we spent late August in Paris, which was absolutely awesome. This was followed a couple of months later by a super-awesome trip to Rome, which I can’t link to because I haven’t written the post because it was overwhelming and I have way too much to say about it. So here are some highlight photos instead. We saw the Pope but he wasnt wearing his stupid hat so, as always with us, a mixed bag there.

Upon our return from Rome, James took a brand new -significantly fancier- role at the giant M&S in the even more giant Westfield Shepherd’s Bush -conveniently located an eight minute bus ride from our house.

I went to Stockholm for work, then followed this up about a month later by returning to Sweden to ruin Ellen’s PhD graduation by MC’ing the celebration dinner. I also found out I am way too ADD to be good at Swedish mushrooming. All around, the trip wasn’t that great for the self-esteem when you think about it. But it was still super-awesome for those of us that weren’t hospitalised. (One of us was.)

Overseas visitors for the year were: Mum and Dad (allegedly to visit us but really mum wanted to go crop circle chasing), Mel, Royce, Ra (James’s brother), Freya and Merryn. (Sorry if I left anyone off.)

My time at Discovery came to an end a few days ago with the canning of almost the entire UK team. Easy come, easy go. I met some great people and got to talk about sharks a lot. Plus it has given me ample free time to prepare for the world’s most awesomest, most savings-est Christmas dinner ever! The addition of frequent snowfalls over the last week has made this more fun than I technically thought possible.

Through hours of planning, repeated re-reading of Delia’s and Nigella’s Christmas books and strategic use of James’s M&S discount we have:

• Homemade chili jam and pickled onions to match some amazing British cheeses
• Homemade fresh cranberry sauce for the day in question
• Drinks: red wine will be Chateauneuf du Pape, champagne will be actual champagne, the port is aged 21 years and all for a few quid a head. (The trick is to combine the 20% staff discount with ‘25% off when you buy a half dozen’ then buy 18 bottles.)
• Ham, Nigella turkey (steeped outside in water and herbs for two days), Harrod’s pudding, the world’s most alcoholic trifle, etc, etc, etc

I am honestly so unbelievably excited about this. But then I have to live up to all the money we spent on ornaments. Also it’s at the top of my mind because we just this morning returned from round three of laying in all the food I will be preparing for the massive and exciting Antipodean orphans Christmas I’ll be cooking. The checkout lady at Chiswick M&S said “well, you’re having a very M&S Christmas, aren’t you?” When we agreed, she continued with “is there any other kind?”

So with that, may I just wish you an unbelievably awesome Christmas and New Year from myself, James and apparently the whole team here at Marks & Spencer.

You see, Christmas belongs here. Traditional Yuletide fare is essentially Western European survival foods: goose, preserved fruits, Christmas pudding (which lasts for years), etc.

I mentioned this before but, back home, I always found it slightly odd that my mother would light our dessert on fire and serve it in a heavily air conditioned room while the temperature outside topped forty. It’s incongruous -like strapping two cats into a baby bouncer. It doesn’t seem quite right.

The lead-up to Christmas is also so wonderful in the Northern Hemisphere… Especially London. The city is lit up like some kind of time-traveling hooker from the future. She still stinks and is crawling with god-knows-what but if you drink enough mulled wine and squint… Well… She’s so pretty!

So that’s the problem. The actual day belongs here and the lead-up belongs here but if that time-traveling hooker brought back some kind of wish-granting machine I would also like to spend the Christmas break back in the warmth.

The thing is… All the best bits about Christmas are the most Pagan; gorging yourself on food with members of your bloodline, garlanding trees with lights and colours, alcoholic drinks served with breakfast… It’s all Pagan and it’s all good. The shit bits belong to the interloping Christians: staying sober-ish so you don’t vomit on all the old people you have to sit next to on uncomfortable church pews in the middle of the night, actually going to church in the middle of the night, being bored fuckless hearing about the story of the ‘real’ St Nick. (Sorry, he’s still based on two Northen European Pagan gods. Who cares if there was some pedophile bishop in the fourth century?)

So, basically I just want all the Pagan bits of Christmas. And what could be more Pagan than basking in the rays of the sun and putting ocean-going animals in fire for two whole weeks while wearing as little as possible?

This is the Christmas break I find myself yearning for. Nothing beats it. The trade-off is painful.

Oh well, I shall have to make do with ornament shopping in the best Christmas store in the world:

Christmas really plays to Harrod’s strengths; OTT, camp tat. Figuring it would be crowded, we got there before it opened to loiter like pensioners in front of a closed department store. At least two thousand people had the same idea as us -including these fur protesters who appeared out of nowhere the second the doors opened. The looks of confusion and bewilderment on the faces of the European tourists as they had pamphlets forced into their hands were priceless -a true Christmas miracle.

After shoving past the protesters and old people we made a beeline for the ornament section (helpfully found online by James using nothing but an iPhone and twenty minutes spare time).

We got maybe seven minutes browsing before the hordes worked out where the ornaments were and descended. Now, usually crowds send me into a vile rage that only seven beers consumed alone in the dark can alleviate.

But today I didn’t mind. Here’s why I think that is:

To get to the ornament section, you have to head up two floors from the side entrance and then wade through three rooms of extremely over-priced whiteware. You know the kinds of things; five hundred pound coffee machines, a juicer that speaks French, a sandwich toaster made of unicorn hooves. Nothing in these rooms -if purchased- will be used more than once and not in any essential capacity. You won’t see any of these things in the first permanent colonies mankind builds in space. Because they’re crap that only Russian new money buys to put in holiday houses they never visit.

These rooms were practically empty.

The ornament section, by contrast, was a middle class mosh pit.

And I thought to myself… Good. Good!

Perhaps we are coming out of this recession a little wiser? Sure, we are still spending (one of our boxes of ornaments cost forty pounds) but we -or at least my middle class moshers- weren’t buying shit. We are all spending on something that is way better than a French-speaking sushi warmer that also connects to the iTunes store.

For what are Christmas ornaments if not the backdrop to two whole days spent in the company of your nearest and dearest? In my eyes they are the visible representation of an idea. The idea that the company you keep is the most valuable thing in your life… That the people you choose to spend your days with are worth celebrating… They are literally worth making your entire house look like a drag queen’s shoe collection.

So spend, my middle class horde… Spend!

There is nothing better than eating and drinking with good company in front of sparkly, shiny things.

And in that spirit I would just like to say… Wish you all were here.

In his defence, it was truly fucking horrible. He got smashed in the face by wet garbage while waiting at the bus stop. The rest of us (except Monique because she’s a witch, maybe?) got completely soaked at the Portobello Road Market.

Serves us right for looking at antiques.

Of course, the plus side of the horrific weather is that we arrived at/fled into our dinner venue before 2pm, thus allowing for an extended drinking session. By the way, if you’re in the Notting Hill area, upstairs at The Oak is awesome.

And quiet during the day! As you can plainly see from my poor phone photography below:

So happy fiftieth (or something) to Leon. Nobody got you a cake so I wasn’t able to work out how old you are.

In general, the Antipodean Birthday Summit was a blast. As the evening wore on, Ryan even decided to chair an impromtu vampire board meeting:

You know, I hate to admit this in case any/both of my trendy North London friends read the post, but there was something extremely nice about kicking it Wes’side, for once. I’m so used to travelling to the other side of town for entertainment that I forget that we’re really not all that far from fun.

If your idea of fun is rain-sodden antiques, wet garbage in the face and pizza at a restaurant that doesn’t take bookings before struggling home through a gale.

And then blogging about it.

Because apparently mine is.

Whilst recently in Sweden, I purchased said gumboots from the Swedish equivalent of Walmart. I think this should be called Svalmart, but they went with Coop.

Whatevs. Bygones.

Anyway, so I sunk thirty quid (on sale, of course) into some gumboots and went mushrooming in the Swedish woods. First let me say that I am shit at mushrooming. This could be because I am easily distracted. So now I have a bunch of photos of the Swedish woodland, some gumboots and no mushrooms.

The thing about spending thirty quid on gumboots for an unsuccessful mushrooming attempt is that you don’t really feel you’ve got your money’s worth. I wore them around town (Gothenburg) a bit, as this is normal behaviour in Sweden when it’s wet -which it almost always is.

I also happened to see some impossibly glamorous Italian women sporting gumboots in Rome the other week -where it is rarely wet but was for almost the entire holiday.

Putting these two pieces together with the fact I walk to work through three parks each day in London, I decided to bring them home via some extreme suitcase stuffing.

So, for this entire week I have woken up, leaped to the window and pulled back the curtains like a child on Christmas morning (somewhere in the northern hemisphere unless the child is retarded). Unfortunately it has been dry each morning in London -which is almost never is at any time of the year.

But today… Today was my day! It was pouring. AND James and I were going out for morning coffee because he had to buy some desk bells for work because his new job is really weird. (PS James got a new job.)

On went the gumboots and into a plastic bag went my white leather shoes. Off we went.

Stomp stomp. Suck it, late autumn leaves! Suck it, disgusting polluted puddles! Suck it, pile of unidentifiable garbage!

It was only at the cafe -which is about half way to work- that I realised something was wrong. Terribly wrong. These gumboots weren’t as comfortable as I remember them being in the squishy green undergrowth of a cool Swedish forest. In fact, could these roomy, fleece-lined, awesome shoes be giving me… Blisters?

After coffee I half limped to the office and got changed. Still wanting to celebrate the footwear choice I messaged Ellen, my Swedish connection. She messaged right back: “blisters?”

Hell to the yeah. Was this something that only the Swedes know about or is this because my knowledge of gumboots doesn’t extend beyond Paddington Bear (red boots) or Wal Footrot (black boots)?

So they’ll be sitting under my desk all weekend because I couldn’t bear the extra weight as I limped slowly home tonight in my -now muddy- white leather shoes.

Suck it, feet.