The Commons & the Lords

What do you do when you have visiting relatives? You become a tourist in your own city. So, building on the British Museum visit yesterday, today we took Dad & Bridget for a guided tour of the Houses of Parliament.

Highlights:
- being checked for "mortar guns" at the gate (tongue in cheek of course)
- learning about the voting system and how they get the MPs from their various drinking dens to the lobbies in 8 minutes so they can cast their votes (all the pubs have Division Bells in them to let the members know they've got to make a run for it, and the chief whips have been known to bodily throw an MP into the lobby just as the doors are closing)
- seeing how small the Chambers are in real life - it all looks so much bigger on Prime Ministers Questions!
- hearing about Maggie T's reaction to her statue in the anteroom to the Commons (oh, couldn't it be made of Iron?)

And we rounded it off with a
long boozy lunch in the Cinnamon Club afterwards: utterly fabulous flavours, my taste buds thought they'd died and gone to heaven...