(London, England, U.K.)

In between my tour of Parliament and the Jools Holland concert at the Royal Albert Hall, I had an entire afternoon free in London.  As I had stumbled upon so many interesting things on a random walk two days earlier, I decided to do the same thing after leaving the Houses of Parliament.

Heading westward, I passed Westminster Abbey and found myself in the sprawling St. James Park.  The crowds were immense, as the park was right between Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace.  There was a lot of almost-domesticated wildlife:  these ducks, swans and squirrels had long ago figured out that they could live well by getting relatively close to humans.

I arrived at Buckingham Palace (see photo at top of this post) just after 12:00 noon.  It is certainly a large building but I found the setting to be more impressive than the palace itself. This did not seem to deter many tourists:  the roads were kept clear by police but it was otherwise extremely crowded in front of the palace.

Craving some space, I decided to continue west and soon found myself  in Belgravia.  Along the way, I came across the “Bag o’ Nails” pub.  I knew it was famous for something but couldn’t remember what.  It turns out that this was a famous music venue in the 1960s and was also the pub where Paul McCartney first met his wife Linda in 1967.   [As much of “A Hard Day’s Night” was filmed at the Scala Theatre on Tottenham Court Road in Fitzrovia, I probably also saw the place where George Harrison met his first wife in 1964!].

Belgravia is posh, with immaculate and imposing white buildings everywhere.  I wasn’t surprised to see many embassies here.  While it was nice to look at and there were certainly no crowds, I was beginning to get hungry and Belgravia didn’t seem to have any restaurants.  I began walking northeast and, after passing the edge of Hyde Park, found myself in Mayfair.

Mayfair is another one of those names that I had heard before but didn’t have any real meaning to me.  Now it does: Mayfair is the shopping district for those who are unconcerned about price.  It’s beautiful, with ornate buildings and an unhurried air suggesting that everything is lovingly scrubbed down and polished on a daily basis.

I was getting quite hungry but I was wearing blue jeans and a scruffy sweater.  Even if the Mayfair restaurants had appealed to me, I doubt that I would have been welcome in them.  I reluctantly looked at the map and decided to head towards Oxford Street…it would be crowded, but it would be much easier to find an appropriate place for lunch.

Oxford Street was impossibly busy but I found an unassuming café on a street running parallel to and north of Oxford.  I paused to look at the menu and I was reassured by a patron that the food was good.  For just under 5 pounds, I had a surprisingly good lasagna and a fruit juice at the Mustard Café.

As I had walked about 5 miles since leaving Parliament, I didn’t push myself too hard for the rest of the afternoon. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t completely exhausted by the time I made it to the Royal Albert Hall!

(London, England, U.K.)

My last two posts (on the Royal Albert Hall concert and the Beatles pilgrimage) represented the last two musical highlights of my visit to London.  However, I still have quite a bit of non-musical stuff to report.

First, however, I want to share a strange coincidence that I noticed after posting the Royal Albert Hall report.  I had mentioned one concert in particular (the “Concert for George”) as being one of my favourites.  This concert was held in the Royal Albert Hall on November 29, 2002, being exactly one year to the day after the death of George Harrison (November 29, 2001).  Jools Holland was one of the performers at that tribute concert.  When did I see Jools Holland perform at the Royal Albert Hall?  November 29, 2014.

On the afternoon of Friday, November 28, I went on a walking tour of “Legal London”:   the purpose was to see some of the city’s legal landmarks, with a focus on the ancient “Inns of Court” that formed the basis of the legal profession for barristers.

In Canada, every lawyer is a “barrister and solicitor”, although in practice most lawyers choose to specialize in one or the other.  In England, however, there is a much stronger separation between the two.  A solicitor will rarely, if ever, appear in court.   If anything becomes contentious, a solicitor generally refers the matter to a barrister.

Each barrister is associated with one of the four Inns of Court that are located within easy walking distance of each other just west of downtown London.  Traditions die hard here:  these are the same medieval Inns of Court that Charles Dickens wrote of in the 19th century.  We saw a legal robe and wigmaker that has been in business continuously since the 17th century.

Dickens didn’t think much of lawyers (nor did he think much of my hometown of Kingston, Ontario, incidentally) but at least he was writing from personal experience.  He clerked at Gray’s Inn for a short time before exploring other career options.  The Inns are relatively quiet urban refuges from the hustle and bustle of modern London, similar in many ways to the colleges of Cambridge University.

The tour ended in the Fleet Street area at the Royal Courts of Justice.  Fleet Street has long been associated with British journalism but in reality most of the media has long since relocated to less expensive real estate.

After the Legal London tour, I didn’t have much time to spare before I needed to head for the distant neighbourhood of Putney for the Los Pacaminos concert.  I allowed plenty of transit time, even though I found a bus route that went from my hotel right to Putney.  The scheduled travel time was an hour, but the incredibly congested city meant that my bus (and every other) was also about an hour late.   I still arrived in time but had to settle for a rather unhealthy fast-food meal before the concert.

Urban gridlock is particularly bad here.  Even a steep congestion tax, which costs you $18.00 every time you want to drive into the city, has done little to alleviate the traffic woes.  There is a comprehensive underground (“the Tube”) system, but it too is prone to severe delays:  my relatively short underground trip the following night to Kensington also took at least about half-an-hour longer than it should have.

Looking back, transportation was about the only negative experience I had in London.  The buses and trains themselves, however, were relatively well-kept and I certainly never had any safety concerns.