Er, yeah, HALF of the Cutty Sark

The Cutty Sark ship

The day started so well! Brilliant bank holiday sunshine, after the cold, washed out weekdays and the aura of OFSTED inspections. I packed my little suitcase and headed off to the station for my grand adventure in London. I was due to meet my Czech friend, Dana, whom I have mentioned before, and she had told me that her party would be in Greenwich in the afternoon.

Now, Greenwich isn't the easiest place to get to from Paddington Station, but, after an enjoyable train ride in which I chatted to 3 UK cyclists who were off on a 17-day cycling tour of Albania (!), I figured out how to get there. I took the Bakerloo line, the Jubilee line extension, and finally the much-extended Docklands Light railway, a kind of driverless monorail that flies through the skyscrapers of Docklands, high above the ground. Exciting times! I disembarked at Cutty Sark for the many maritime attractions of Greenwich and sat down opposite the pier in the sunshine. There were approximately seven thousand tourists per square inch, or so it seemed.

Eventually Dana texted and said her group was leaving the Tower of London and getting on the boat. Fine, I thought. The next text, however, asked me if I could come to Westminster pier, way up in the centre of town! Hmmmm. The queue for the fast boat tickets was incredibly long, the tickets were £6, and the boats left every twenty minutes. I knew I'd never catch the next boat, so I hurriedly took this very bad shot of the famous restored Tea Clipper, the Cutty Sark, and rushed off back to town via every form of rail transport known to the Londoner. Large sections of the Underground network were closed for maintenance over the bank holiday weekend, making the planning a little more challenging than usual.

Amazingly, we managed to meet right by Westminster tube, and strolled upriver away from the Houses of Parliament crowds, finishing at an outdoor cafe beside St-Martins-in-the-Fields church, right by Trafalgar Square. At this point I actually relaxed! Dana was happy because she'd done her last-minute shopping of Cadbury's chocolate for her daughter (I told her that it might have been made in Poland, but I wish I hadn't - it still tastes the same, even if it is no longer made by Quakers).

Then it was time to negotiate the tube and a complicated interchange at Waterloo, in order to see Dana onto her section of the Jubilee line. She had to get back to North Greenwich to catch her coach back to the Czech Republic. (North Greenwich isn't particularly near the more famous Greenwich south of the river, at least not directly by public transport, which is one of the reasons why we'd met at Westminster).

I headed off to Walthamstow (bliss, ten tube stops so I could read my book!) and spent a very pleasant evening unwinding with my friend Ann in her little house. The weather dial is set from fair to bloomin' lovely for the entire weekend!