ellarien | London, in detail (Reply)

I arrived in London just before 1pm on Wednesday. The first order of business was to obtain a photograph for the visa. I caught a Victoria Line train to Oxford Circus and walked up Oxford Street, doing a little window-shopping and browsing on the way, to the unprepossessing premises -- over a mobile phone shop opposite Selfridges -- of Passport Photo Service. Speaking merely as a satisfied customer, I can recommend the place; the service is fast, accurate, and actually produces portraits that are somewhat flattering as well as meeting the required specifications. After that, I decided to head for my hotel, not least because I was a little anxious about my reservation. The hotel was in Bayswater. I went a little astray in the maze of underpasses (UK subways) around the Marble Arch Underground (US subway) station, but eventually emerged at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. From there I struck out in a southwesterly direction, surrounded by sun-faded grass and scattered trees, until I found a tree to sit under, consulted my map, and realized that Bayswater is actually north, not south, of the park. I adjusted my heading accordingly, came out at the Victoria Gate on Bayswater Road, and kept going west. I had a little trouble finding the hotel, tucked away on a square with an eccentric pattern of house-numbering, but I got there eventually, and they did indeed have a room for me. Once in the room -- uninspiring but adequate, and at least less claustrophobic than last year's, which was barely big enough for a single bed -- I became deeply boring and stayed there for the rest of the afternoon, watching TV and reading. In the evening I ate a modest dinner at the hotel's modest restaurant, succeeded after multiple attempts (involving a room phone that never achieved anything but a ring tone, a payphone that connected but gave me only silence, and another payphone that connected and then refused to accept my coin) in contacting my mother, and then watched more TV until bedtime.

After breakfast the next morning, I headed out again. I may well not have been the only person that morning who was a tiny bit nervous about being on the tube at rush hour on a Thursday, particularly a tube that kept stopping just short of stations, but the District and Circle lines got me to St Pancras in the end. I wish I'd had my camera along to capture the turrets of the old station against the blue morning sky. I dropped off my bag at the Left Luggage office (not without one last check of the folder of documents for the Embassy) and headed back to Oxford Circus. I wandered gently west, browsing in bookstores as I went. (I note here, mostly for my own reference, that Christopher Wooding may be an author worth investigating.) I was a little disappointed to realize that Waterstones' upstairs coffee shop was in fact the Nero Cafe and not -- as I first read it -- the Nerd Cafe.

Waiting to cross North Audley Street on my way to the embassy, I was slightly delayed by a group of mounted cavalry, with attendant police escort on horses and motorcycles, heading south.

The embassy appointment went smoothly, and rather faster than last year's: it seems that some adjustments have been made to handle the increased volume now thatnearly everybody has to appear in person. My appointment was at 11am: I joined the outside line at 10.30, was inside shortly after 11, and got out before 2 in the afternoon.

After I'd concluded my business at the Embassy, I walked down to Bond Street tube station and took myself off to South Kensington to spend a few hours at the Natural History Museum, contemplating minerals and gemstones and fossils, whales and elephants and rhinos, dodos and birds of paradise. The place has changed out of all recognition since I used to visit as a child, but the skeleton diplodocus in the entrance hall is still there, its tail now waving proudly aloft rather han trailing along the floor. The gift shop still has a fine line in plush animals; I successfully resisted both a woolly mammoth and a lion the size of a three-month-old kitten, but it was a struggle. About five, I went back to the tube station and caught a Picadilly Line train to Kings Cross. Sitting in the carriage, surrounded by tired workers and tourists, realizing that London had achieved another ordinary Thursday, I found that I was enjoying myself.

In a way I still miss London. My time there wasn't all bad; in fact, for the first year I thoroughly enjoyed it. The royal parks are lovely in springtime, and even in winter, even in the grubby streets of Tower Hamlets and the crowded tawdriness of Oxford Street, there's a buzz to the place, a sense of energy and purpose and self-importance that's often missing in the rest of the country. I delighted in the Saturdays and occasional bank holidays when I could go off to tour the museums or the parks or Kew Gardens and come back to my flat for dinner. I loved to look out of the uncurtained window of my living room and see the lights of the City towers, or glimpse Tower Bridge and the Tower of London as the train pulled out of London Bridge Station. The trouble was, it was just too big for met to come to grips with, too big to pin down and label with a single handy referent. After a while, the diversity, the layers upon layers of history, the noise and bustle, the millions of people, just got to be too much, too tiring and bewildering to deal with. Even after the 1996 bombs and the mugging, though, I didn't hate every minute of it. I wouldn't want to live there again, at least not in the inner city, but I still like to visit.