My friend noted the other day that my use of photographs in blog posts is sporadic in the extreme.  Sometimes I use loads, sometimes none at all. She asked me if there was any pattern to this.

I said: ‘Yes!’ I love taking photos, but only if there is something I think is worth photographing.  In London there is always something worth photographing.  My usual, daily routines however, (sketchy though they are), do not really take me to places where photographs are worth the aggravation of rootling around in the bottom of my handbag for my camera for.

Yesterday, for example, I got up when it was dark.  Drove the children to school in the half dark, came home in the grey drizzle and spent all day scrubbing squelchy bits off the floor, dressed in my pyjamas.  The dinner I had planned on cooking did not work, as the lovely sausages I had chosen were still resolutely frozen solid, despite having been out of the freezer for hours.  I made spaghetti bolognese instead, in a random and disorderly fashion due to being in a complete tizz over the sausage failure of 2012.  By the time I had finished cooking, serving and eating dinner we were awash in tomato sauce.

It was carnage.

I consider it a kindness that I did not take any photographs.

This morning it was slightly lighter when I got up.  It was significantly colder.  I was also significantly more crippled.  After not sleeping the night before, I passed out at about half nine last night and must have slept in the same position all night. I woke up with a cricked neck.  I am fine as long as nobody wants me to look  to the right.  Driving has been interesting this morning.  I made lots of ‘oohya’ noises as I progressed.

In the meantime I have made three breakfasts, cleaned out the cat litter tray twice (Derek is OCD about litter trays), made the cat’s breakfast, shouted about cardigans, frisked book bags and hurtled to school.

I say nothing about the laundry. Just take it as a given that every day there is laundry. All day there is laundry.

The car windscreen was frozen this morning.  Although it didn’t look frozen at first. It looked like dew fall.  Then it froze.  I scraped the car, jarring my twisted neck muscles, interspersing my ‘ooohyas’ with bellowed instructions at the children to turn the stereo down (the neighbours are not keen on the Stereophonics at breakfast I surmise), to stop hitting each other, to stop eating their sleeves (why? just, why?) etc.

After the school run I went to B&Q to look at paint swatches and colour charts. Half way down the aisle they turned all the lights off.  I wondered if it was last orders for paint?

Someone else, stumbling about in the gloom like a paint addicted moth, collared what looked like an employee (recognisable only by the glow of their lurid, orange uniform), and asked why the lights were off.

They shouted: ‘Energy saving.’  And ran off.

It’s a bit much when you’re trying to look at forty seven different shades of eau de nil in the twilight.

I gave up, shoving fistfuls of colour strips (always remind me of pregnancy pee sticks in a weirdly surreal way) into my handbag like a colour thief, and bumbling blindly towards the exit.

On the way home, to add insult to injury, it started to snow.  It started to snow in the way that I would snow if I were snow (I know. Verb. Noun. eh? Who knows?), half heartedly, without putting its back into it snow. The odd flake awkwardly flopping onto the car windscreen and then sort of flailing about before giving up entirely and melting.

What is the point of that?

I felt a bit like Basil Fawlty in that episode of Fawlty Towers where he is so frustrated he gets out of the car, uproots a sapling and batters the car with it.

Snow, if you’re going to snow then just do a better job of it. Put some energy into it or bugger off back to whichever cloud you came from.

Yes. I know. It seems an irrational response to weather, given that we have so bloody much of it here, and there really isn’t anything to be done about it, but this is how I roll.

Awkwardly, with very little sense of purpose, and a great deal of pent up aggression.

I sit here now, surrounded by shades of ‘Jungle Fever’, ‘Royal Regatta’, and ‘Steel Symphony’, mesmerised by the stupidity of the names they give to paint these days.  It reminds me of the time I wrote to Constance Carroll the shitty, cheap make up makers of my youth, asking for a job as an eye shadow namer.

It would have been fabulous.

Sadly they never replied.

So you can see that it is shaping up to be another, no pictures day.

It is for the best.

Not only do lots of my friends use their phones for phoning people and the now ‘normal’ texting. They use it as their organiser, calendar, camera and to take notes with. This might sound normal to you. To me it is akin to witchcraft.

I cannot get used to this multi tasking of devices thingy, despite owning a very nice iPhone that Jason strong armed me into getting, all the time muttering about my Luddite ways.

I like it more than I thought I would.  I now use it for phoning, texting, some photos and as an excellent alarm clock.  I do not use any of the rest of its functionality though, including Twitter, despite being a prolific Tweeter (and sometimes Twatter). I do not use it to search the internet for stuff, I have uploaded absolutely no apps. I have no music on it at all. I am hopeless.

I did try googling something on it once, in a fit of desperation, but I hate the way the page doesn’t fit the screen and you have to slide about all over to read everything. It makes me feel slightly sea sick.

The thing I hate most about it though is the idea that I might want to use it as some kind of notebook.

I don’t know why it fills me with horror, but it does.

A notebook is perfectly good for taking notes with, is my immediate thought.  And by that you will gather that I do not mean a small laptop. I mean an actual, physical bunch of paper between two covers.

I know, I know. I am practising for old ladyhood well in advance of my time.

This weekend I packed light. I got everything I needed for two days in one reasonable sized hand bag.  I felt very chuffed with my ninja packing abilities and allowed myself a warm glow of superiority as I watched people trundling up and down Euston with cumbersome luggage.

When I was lurking about somewhere or other I overheard a lovely conversation that I wanted to write down. I reached into my bag only to find I had not packed a notebook.  I was bereft.  I hate travelling without pen and/or paper.  It’s a bit like being naked.  ALL WRONG.

I knew I could have fiddled about for forty minutes with my phone, cursing and sweating, and smearing my fingers over it, but the thought just made me sad.  I was right by the British Library by this point.  They have an excellent shop (where they are currently offering 10% off an ‘Electronic Beowulf’, which made me laugh immoderately).  I dashed in to purchase a notebook.  Surely they would have a notebook facility in a library, however high tech.

They did.

Frabjous day.

I am, it will not surprise you to know, rather fussy about my notebooks.  I do not like novelty notebooks that have cutesy pictures of kittens on, or scented pages, or little locks and keys.  I find them irritating.  They are pretend notebooks.  I think I feel about them the way most alcoholics think about social drinkers. ‘Waste of bloody space.’

I like a good, stout notebook.  The word ‘serviceable’ is key to my notebook purchasing activities.  I prefer them plain on the outside. I also like them plain on the inside (there are exceptions to this, but not many).  I cannot write in straight lines without ruled lines to guide me, but this hinders me not. I often write my notes sideways and upside down anyway, so I’m much happier with blank pages.

It can be quite hard to find such sensible note pads, particularly if you don’t want spiral bound or exercise books, which I don’t.

For a long time I used to buy myself lovely notebooks and then not write in them. I was sorting out a cupboard one day and found that I had about ten, all beautiful, none written in.  I had a word with myself.  I realised that when I bought a beautiful notebook, I felt I had to write beautiful things in it, and because I undoubtedly would not be able to write beautiful things in it, I simply didn’t write anything at all.

It took me a long time to get over this.  I am now firmly of the opinion that it doesn’t matter what you write (or where), as long as you write, and the more you write, the more comfortable you will be with your writing.  You might guess this from the rambling, unscheduled, mind flitting nature of the blog.  Partly it is like this because this is what my brain is like, but mostly it is like this because of the above revelation.

In my opinion, writing works a bit like taking photos. If you take hundreds of photos, some of them will turn out to be exactly how you imagined they would be, and all will be well.  If you take one or two, there is so much riding on the expectation, they will probably disappoint you.  You can sieve for gold after you’ve collected all the gravel.  You can’t sieve for any if you don’t have anything to sieve in the first place.

A peculiar metaphor I grant you.  I probably won’t send it to the metaphysical poets’ society, but you get my drift.

I also think how excited future generations will be, if my writing ever becomes famous, and they discover my higgledy piggledy notebooks.  It will afford future academics endless hours of fun boggling over what ‘Fucking Hell! Subs.’ means at some deep, philosophical level, when it is actually a note to self that Brownies need me to sell a kidney again.

Anyway, back to the British Library shop. I faffed about, disregarding numbers of things with pictures of Alice in Wonderland on, or ones that had specific labels for things I was supposed to do with them.

Right at the back of the shop was a stand of Moleskine notebooks.

I REVERE Moleskine notebooks.  Ever since I had a total infatuation with Bruce Chatwin in my late teens, I have coveted a Moleskine notebook.  Chatwin wrote all his books and travel writings in Moleskine notebooks.  I don’t quite know why I find this fact so alluring, but I do.

It suddenly dawned on me that in all my years of reverence and notebook purchasing I had never owned a Moleskine notebook.  I examined my conscience. It appears that a) I had been put off by the price, which is indeed a little steep for what is essentially a bunch of paper (about £13 for an average sized notebook, although they start at about £8), b) I was daunted by the ghost of Bruce (would I live up to his exacting standards), and c) I generally didn’t have the funds when I came across them or had the funds but didn’t come across them.

Reader, I married him.

I bought myself a plain, black, soft bound Moleskine notebook with blank pages inside.

It felt like the height of decadence.

It was the height of decadence.

I ripped the covering off in the shop and rushed off to write notes in it immediately.

Imagine my joy when I fumbled in my bag for a pen, and pulled out my favourite, violet inked fountain pen.

My image of myself as an eccentric woman of letters was complete.  It would only have been bettered if Bruce himself had come sweeping up the library steps and gallantly escorted me to tea.

Sadly, as he is long dead, this is unlikely to happen.

But it’s nice to dream.

I managed to catch up on all my weekend blogging due to two simple facts. The first being that I was constrained to stay at home today and tackle the festering mess that our house had become, and I couldn’t face doing it all at once, there was so much of it.

Regular breaks had to be taken.

The second was that I had one of the worst night’s sleep I had had in ages last night.  My brain was totally buzzing by the time I got in from the station, and I just could not switch it off.  By the time I got to bed I was jittering like I’d had a triple espresso.  I finally dropped off somewhere between two and three.  Jason said I kept waking him up with nightmares, and just as he had soothed me to sleep and I seemed quite peaceful, the geese who live on the lake which is about 100 yards from our house decided to honk in unison.

I do not remember this, but according to Jason I was massively perturbed by this, and insisted that it was the children honking.  We had a small altercation until I finally accepted that it was in fact geese, whereupon I became quite indignant.

Mixing up the noise of your children with the noise of geese honking is quite normal, by the way.  They are very alike.

I am grateful I was asleep for this conversation.  Although I would have been more grateful if I hadn’t had to get up at 6.45 a.m. to get the children to school. I have been too tired to be competent today at anything other than scrubbing floors and pounding the keyboard.

I was supposed to be helping Andrea sort out some colour swatches and testers for her house.  She is having some serious house renovations done, which means repainting eventually.  She has asked me to help. Not with the painting itself. She is not that desperate.  No, I am to help with the naming of parts and choosing of colours.

I’d much rather have been helping Andrea play with paints than scrubbing the kitchen floor.

I don’t know whether I will actually be any help to her in the long run, but it would be nice to try.  Luckily for me, she agreed I could pop by tomorrow instead of today.

I only have two schools of thought with regard to wall colours.  They are a) paint everything cream and hang up a lot of pictures to hide it, or b) paint everything in super bright colours and then hang up a lot of pictures to hide it.

I don’t know whether she knows this yet.

She will after tomorrow.

I have said this before, but there is always a price to pay if you run away and pretend you don’t have children/family.  It’s like the people you have left behind have some kind of sniffer dog skills which they employ to scent the fact that you are having far too nice a time, and therefore they must completely trash your house as a punishment on your return.

I confess that I didn’t leave it in the tidiest of states.  Last week was mostly spent by me, idly propping up the sofa cushions while reading books.

Despite this it didn’t quite look like the windswept, hurricane style stickiness that I came home to.

Apparently Jason had tidied up somewhat before I got back.

I am profoundly grateful, albeit rather sceptical as to what he tidied, and where.

I should be thankful that the devastation before me finally spurred me on to abandon the sofa and my book and make the house habitable again.  Even last week I would have been ashamed to accept visitors for more than a fleeting, ten minute chat in which it would have been better for all concerned if they had stayed standing up, and not moved about too much.

Am I grateful?

Am I ‘eck as like.

Way back in the day it was a Tudor palace, apparently.  It was extensively remodelled in the 18th Century (i.e. knocked down and rebuilt) to be the home of the Navy board and various Royal societies.  It is an insanely large building built around an insanely large courtyard.

In the summer they have concerts and events in the courtyard. I once went to a Lambchop concert there, back when I was aspiring to be hip.  In the Winter they turn it into an ice rink.  Yesterday it was mostly empty.

Nowadays the building is used for all kinds of things. There is a deli, and a restaurant and a book shop.  You can visit some of the grandest rooms and wander about.  In other areas they have exhibitions of various kinds, most of which are free.  Yesterday I visited the Dazed and Confused retrospective.

It was alright.  It was messily curated, the curators preferring to go for visually hip and artistic rather than giving you any real sense of what was what.  Each room was banded into decade time slots, but the rooms were small, the hanging was haphazard and the labelling fairly arbitrary.

I recommend it if you like looking at pictures of Kate Moss with her nipples like chapel hat pegs, and Chloe Sevigny looking petulant in a bath tub wearing some vintage lace.  Otherwise I’d give it a miss.

Some of the Rankin photographs were fabulous, in fairness, but then they’re not uncommon, and if you want to see them better curated I’d advise you to go somewhere like The National Portrait Gallery, which is also free.

Disappointed with this, I made my way to the front of the building to visit The Courtauld Gallery, which has been on my to visit list for a number of years now.

It is a tiny art gallery, which, for its size, has some impressively famous paintings lurking within.  It is not government sponsored, and as such you pay to get in.  The fee for adults is £6, with concessions.

I thought it was a great deal of money for what is essentially a rather small space. I would perhaps have been more enamoured if they had been displaying more paintings that set my heart on fire, but sadly it was not to be.

There is a room on the ground floor which is full of Medieval icons and triptychs and the like, which were really rather beautiful, and which I enjoyed very much.

From there on in my enjoyment waned as I got higher up the building.

If you like the Impressionists you will be very happy. There are some good Monet and Cezanne paintings, some famous Degas and Lautrec paintings, some nice Degas sculpture and a lot of Seurat.  If you like Manet, they have the world famous ‘Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe’, which was a lot smaller and more dreary than I expected.  They also have a few of the lesser known Impressionist painters on display including my first, live to view, Berthe Morisot.

There is a good selection of Fauvist paintings and some unusual Matisse and Dufy  paintings that I hadn’t seen before.  There was a Matisse sculpture of his daughter that I loved very much and would have liked to take home.  There was a disturbingly pedestrian Picasso of a jug of daffodils, and some equally traditional Braque landscapes, pre Cubism.

There is a Hepworth which looks like the leg off a bed, but which the labelling was trying to big up as organic and suggestive of complex metaphysical shapes.

Right.

All in all I got the feeling that apart from a couple of show stoppers, they had collected the early or late or obscure works of lots of well known people because they couldn’t afford anything more ground breaking.

It is a great place to go if you are an art student and you want to see things which are not the usual run of the mill gallery fodder, and which will give you things to talk about in your essays, but I was not keen.

Which was a bit of a shame.

By the time I got out it was half past three and I had had no lunch.  I took a brisk five minute walk to The Real Greek in Covent Garden, and spent a happy hour and a half pushing meze into my face and reading my book:

before making my way back to Euston, where I collapsed onto the train in a heap of sweaty exhaustion.

‘You don’t know?’

To which I replied:

‘Clearly not.’

She said:

‘That’s Darren Hayes’.

I said:

‘Oh! Is that good?’

She said:

‘Don’t you know who he is?’

I said:

‘Mostly I live under a stone.’

She said:

‘He used to be the lead singer of Savage Garden.  Now he’s doing a walkabout film with his fans.  I’m his greatest fan.’

I said:

‘That’s great. Enjoy your afternoon.’

I set off walking away.

She said:

‘Where are you going?’

I said:

‘To the toilet.  I cannot cope with fame…even other people’s.’

Let’s talk about the lovely things I did on Sunday instead.

Starting with a long, leisurely brunch type breakfast at Keith and Noreen’s I sloped off back to town at about eleven o’clock with the intention of going to the V&A.

Mrs Jones advised me to go and see one of their latest acquisitions, a silk cape made from spider silk.

It is rather stunning, and the work that went into it was immense.  Apparently the spiders are recalcitrant beasts who are a bit bone idle, difficult to rear and prone to cannibalism, so getting silk out of them is a herculean task.

It seems fair to say that there are never going to be spider silk sweat shops.

The detail is amazing, and I was very impressed by the spider motif.

It was definitely worth a visit.

While I was there it seemed rude not to see some other things, although I did take my own advice and kept it simple rather than trying to see everything.

I went and visited the netsukes, all of which I wanted passionately.  I waved at the Buddhas as I went past:

Then I popped upstairs and visited the jewels, which are stunningly displayed and quite, quite marvellous.

I bumped into an angel on a stair case:

I snuck a look at a mini exhibition in a corridor that showed a load of Beatrix Potter’s original drawings and paintings.

I moseyed through the performing arts section, including what to me was an utterly pointless and dismal exhibition called ‘The House of Annie Lennox’.  Ga Ga it aint.

It was redeemed by this magnificent costume for the absurdist play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco:

I have always wanted to see this play performed.  I hope they revive it soon.

Then I came back through the stained glass gallery and went out into the afternoon air with my head bursting.

I had wanted to go to the fashion galleries but they’re all being refurbished at the moment.

I can wait.

My advice regarding these high footfall destinations is to plan ahead.  Go early and turn up before things open, so you can get a head start.  The children and I did this when we went to The Tower of London.  We were first in, first out.  By the time we left there was a queue for the crown jewels so long they were putting up barriers.  We walked straight in and had the place virtually to ourselves.  Going at the end of the day is also a good idea, although you can be more pushed for time as people try to shut things round you.  Visiting things at lunch times is also a good idea.  I have found that most people are alarmingly regular about feeding times, and there is usually a mass exodus between twelve and two when everyone gallops off to eat.  An ideal time to see something that would otherwise be madly busy.

As far as this goes I would also recommend that you eat at unorthodox times.  If we are going to try and get lunch somewhere touristy we generally try to sit down for about 11.30 or after 1.30 to avoid the crowds.  It works a treat.

If you really feel that you must see as much as possible in one day then a tour is the thing for you.  I generally avoid these like the plague, but here are my top tour tips.

Bus tours are O.K.  They are not cheap, but they are flexible and you can get on and off when you please and use one ticket all day, which takes the sting out of it a bit.  You will be stuck in traffic at some point, so be patient.  You will almost certainly be cold. Most of the buses are open topped, and even those that aren’t are bloody freezing.  Wrap up warmly and shed layers if necessary.  If you are trapped on a bus for three hours in sub zero temperatures while you turn blue you are less likely to be paying attention to the sights.

Bus tours will not show you everything.  They will show you what is available to see only within a small area of central London.  You will probably get to see Buckingham Palace and the Mall, quite a few London parks, which are entirely uninteresting from the outside, regardless of the delights within.  You will see Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s Column and a few other things.  You will miss more than you see. I guarantee it.

Boat tours are fine but only if you want to see what’s on the river. Do bear in mind, and again I am stating the bleeding obvious here, that not every major London tourist attraction is visible from the river.  In fact, most things are not. Things you can see from the river include:

• The Tower of London
• All the bridges (surprisingly)
• The ex Millenium Dome (if the tour goes that far up)
• Bits of Greenwich (if it goes that far up), but not The Cutty Sark
• The London Eye
• The National Theatre
• The Royal Festival Hall
• The Houses of Parliament and Big Ben
• Tate Modern
• The Globe Theatre
• Bits of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Once you are on the boat tour, again with the bleeding obvious, you cannot get off, so if you don’t like it you are stuck for the duration.  Check how long the cruise will last if you are unsure as to whether you will enjoy it.  Again, it will most probably be freezing.

I am usually a big fan of pre booking things, but in the case of the boat tours I would say that you should play it by ear.  If it is widdling it down or foggy then you will see bugger all and have utterly wasted your money.

I would advise against Rickshaws unless you are a) young b) foolish c) only going a short distance d) have a death wish.  Having seen a rickshaw driver nearly kill three people by cycling them round Marble Arch it has put me off for life.

I would recommend trying some of the other, more unusual methods of touring though. The Duck Tours are supposed to be excellent and I am hoping to go on one this year.  They are amphibious vehicles that drive you through London and then drive you into the river. Rock on.  We did a duck tour with the children in Seattle and it was brilliant.

Walking tours are fantastic. There are hundreds of them. They are on all subjects from The Beatles to Jack The Ripper, and take place at all kinds of times and places.  The only proviso being that you obviously have to be fit enough to walk for the duration of the tour. I do not advise doing these with small children unless they are a) hardy b) used to walking long distances without assistance and keeping up with adults c) not going to whinge when they get bored.  Having said that, I took my kids on a ghost walk two years ago and they loved it.

If you are thinking of taking in a show I advise pre booking your tickets strongly. You can talk to the booking agent and make sure you have a seat that suits you at a price that suits you and a time that suits you.  There are places you can go to pick up last minute tickets, and yes, there are deals to be had, but to be honest these are few and far between.  My experience of last minute impulse theatre is usually that I get a dreadful seat with restricted view and still pay more than I am entirely happy with.  Not only that but I have had to queue for a considerable time for it.  Cut price ticket booths are generally always busy as hell.  Queueing for returns outside an individual theatre can work, but it is a gamble and you will wait for a considerable time if the show is popular.  Ticket touts are a flat no, as are the shops that promise tickets for all the top shows. They charge a fortune.

I know I keep going on about balance, but I really do believe it makes for an easier and more enjoyable experience if you can balance what you are doing wisely. Another trick I favour on this front is interspersing doing the really popular stuff with more off the beaten track things.  There are plenty of books and websites which recommend things to do which are generally lumped under the heading of hidden London.  I highly recommend most of the things they offer up.  Some of our best experiences as a family have come about through doing the quirky and unusual stuff rather walking the well beaten paths of the tourist attractions.  Off the top of my head I can think of:

• The Denis Severs House
• The Columbia Road Flower Market
• The Hunterian Museum
• The Fashion and Textile Museum
• Coram Fields

In terms of things to do I will mention a few places that I found utterly disappointing despite them being on the world tourist destination route:

Madame Tussauds - They aint fooling anyone. The place is surprisingly small, the effigies are unsurprisingly unlike their celebrity counterparts and you are hurried in and out like you are on a giant conveyor belt.  There is no time when I have been past when the queues have not been truly horrific in proportion and you will be crowded, jostled and ripped off. It is incredibly expensive for what it is.

Buckingham Palace - I confess that I have never been in.  I am not a huge fan of the architecture, what I have seen of the interior design, or the Queen. It is not my go to destination.  When it is open, it is very expensive, so you really have to want to go.  If you are not actually going in, then you are going to see exactly what you see on the television, a bloody huge grey building with a flag outside, bristling with guards.  That is all.  The changing of the guards is alright, but it will be crowded, and unless you are right at the front you are not going to see much at all.

Anything for tourists based around Piccadilly Circus/Leicester Square.  There are  Ripley’s Believe it or Not type things and Rock Museums and Rainforest Cafes and the like. I have been to some of these things and they are plastic, expensive rip offs of the worst kind.

Going to the cinema in Leicester Square.  You will pay twice the price you do at home to watch the same film in usually shabbier surroundings.

The London Dungeon: Tacky, expensive and silly.  It is utterly unscary if you are grown up.  If you are a child you will probably have to be carried out screaming, thus proving no fun to man nor beast.  I speak from experience.

Here are my top tips:

Pack Light: You will spend large parts of your time on the move. The more you have the more you can lose on various forms of transport.  Things inevitably get heavier as the day wears on so the less you have, the less achey you are likely to get.  Quite a few places now restrict how big your bag is, and make you deposit things in cloakrooms, which can be aggravating.  Harrods for example are fanatical about bag sizes, and their cloakroom is miles away.  Save yourself the grief and pack light.

Wear comfortable clothing.  Imagine you are going up the Amazon. Wear layers so you can strip and reassemble as you go depending on air conditioning, heating etc. Also comfortable shoes are a must.  I have never, ever been to London and not walked far more than I do anywhere else in the world.

London is huge.  I say this to people, and they nod sagely, and think about the biggest city they have ever been in.  Unless the biggest city they have ever been in is say Mexico City or New York, they’re really not getting it.  It’s bloody MAHOOSIVE.  As such it is wise to plan what you are going to do before you go.  You really do not want to waste what little time you have either a) getting endlessly lost or b) travelling on myriad tubes to get to things that are absolutely miles apart from each other.  You can literally spend two hours crossing the city depending on where you are and where you want to get to.  Plan wisely and well, and as I said in my previous blog post about transport, it will probably take longer to get to most places than you anticipate, particularly in very touristy areas, so give yourself a little more time than you think you need.

I recommend picking one or two places to visit per day, tops.  I know my activities of yesterday give the lie to this, but do take into account that I was travelling without my children and could pretty much please myself, and I had no real deadlines to adhere to.  I had the liberty of freedom.  Most people who go to London as tourists are either constrained by time, or being in a party or by shepherding a family.  If you do too much you will get weary, footsore and tetchy and that will spoil the sheer marvellousness of everything, which would be a shame.

Picking things which are relatively near to each other is a good way to cut down on sore feet and navigational woes.  It seems obvious, but not so many people do this in practice and the tube is full of weary, stressed out people who could have planned their sight seeing a little better.  I would not, for example, advocate doing Buckingham Palace and Hampton Court Palace in the same day.  You will spend most of your time travelling and very little of your time seeing anything.

There is a book called Walk the Lines: The London Underground, Overground by Mark Mason, which someone recommended to me. It is a travel guide which tells you what things there are to see and do when you emerge from every tube station in London.  This is brilliant.  I believe there is an iPhone app for this, and I will be purchasing it.

Some things deserve a day in themselves.  Do a bit of research, think about the size and scale of what it is you are going to see and plan realistically.  Places that I think need at least a day to themselves are:

• The Natural History Museum
• The Victoria & Albert Museum
• The Science Museum
• London Zoo
• The British Museum
• The Tower of London
• Hampton Court Palace
• Kew Gardens

There are undoubtedly more. This is just off the top of my head.

With the Science Museum, The V&A and The Natural History Museum, people are lured into trying to do either all three or at the least two of these together, as they are all next door to each other.  This is a fool’s errand unless you do what I did when I took the children.  We picked one floor or exhibition at each museum and just saw that specific thing before moving on to the next place.

You may think I am exaggerating regarding time and size etc, but do bear in mind that the V&A has about eleven miles of corridors alone, and several thousand exhibits.  You cannot do it all.  You simply cannot.

Stick Together.  When I say things get busy, they really get busy. At peak times at some tube stations the crowding is so dense that you will not even get onto the platform the first go round.  It is very easy to get separated from people, particularly if you are with children. If your children have a tendency to run away from you, I recommend lashing them to your side, or travelling at quieter times to less popular places.

Lots of museums are free, which is fantastic, but most will charge for special exhibitions or activities.  If you have it in mind that you want to see something specific in a museum or gallery, check to see if there is a charge, or if you have to book.  Some things are so popular (Grayson Perry and Hockney to name but two) that not only do you have to pay, but you have to book timed tickets.  This will mean that you can actually see the exhibits, which is a good thing, but you do need to be more focussed and drift less if you are on a timed ticket deadline.

Do not anticipate that you will be able to get in on the off chance. This rarely happens unless you are prepared to queue patiently for long periods of time. On Saturday at the Royal Academy, the queues for returned tickets was down through the courtyard and nearly to the pavement.  You did not come to London to spend three hours in a queue with the distinct possibility of failure at the end.  If you really do want to see something then pre book before you go.  I speak from bitter experience.  I am still gutted that I missed the Terracotta Warriors at the British Museum, and that was years ago.

From a budgeting point of view I would also recommend trying to balance free stuff with stuff you have to pay for.  London Zoo, for example, is exorbitantly expensive to get into, and might even make you cry as you part with your cash. Primrose Hill park, which sits right next to it, is free. As is Regent’s Park.  You may need the joy of the free thing after parting with the thick end of £100 for a family to go to the zoo.

Look for deals.  If you get a family rail card you usually get a book of vouchers for money off various activities, many of which are within London.  Use them, but make sure you have read all the terms and conditions. The railcard vouchers are fairly restrictive and quite punitive, and if you haven’t filled out what you need to fill out and presented all your paperwork they are not forgiving.

Some places do membership or year passes.  The Royal Palaces have a family pass that lasts for a year, and if you intend to visit more than one of the palaces, is exceptionally good value for money.

If you are going for the day and want to save money then I suggest you take sandwiches and drinks with you.  There are cafes and restaurants and supermarkets of every shape, colour and creed in every nook and cranny of London, but things are more expensive than they are at home, unless you live in Japan or favour the MacDonalds/KFC school of catering, in which case you will be fine, as long as you don’t mind the long queues.  If you are going somewhere that is site specific and you cannot come in and out on a ticket as you please, like The Tower of London, the cafes etc are expensive and taking your own snacks is a good idea.  London Zoo is particularly galling as the food is not very nice and it is very expensive.  It is one of the few places I’ve ever been where I regretted not bringing my own grub with me.

If you are going in a group I would advise the bleeding obvious again and try to do a mix of things that will please as many people as possible. When I go to London with the children we take it in turns to pick what we will do so that everyone gets their heart’s desire. It saves a lot of angst, because even if they’re not having the best time right now, they’ve either just had it, or it’s coming up.

For most of my visit I was pretty much undisturbed, having got there hideously early.  It was only as I was coming to the end of the exhibition that I started encountering people.

At one point there were two teenage girls who had come in and done the entire exhibition in about ten minutes flat (I was there for two hours, and only the impending threat of eye strain and starvation forced me out in the end).

They were staring at one of the displays about ten feet away from where I was when one of them said:

‘What I don’t get, right.  What I don’t get is how come if they had these huge bits of paper, how come they made the writing so small? I just don’t get it.’

This was the same girl, who only moments later said to her friend:

‘Look at that picture.  It looks just like it was painted by hand…’

Her friend, to her eternal credit, very calmly said:

‘It is.  They all are.’

To which her friend said:

‘What for? I don’t know why they’d bother when they could print ‘em.’

We left and wandered into The Burlington Arcade.  Laduree was heaving with macaron enthusiasts and it was too cold to sit out at the pavement tables.

We kept moving in our quest for sustenance.

Wandering down New Bond Street we happened upon the Halcyon Gallery, where they are showing the work of Dale Chihuly, an artist who runs a studio dedicated to making insane glass sculptures.

I’ve seen some of Chihuly’s work before.  He was responsible for a huge glass installation that used to reside on the ceiling in the lobby of The Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas.  I’ve also seen his stuff in various design museums over the years, and featured in a documentary about his work for a botanic garden in New York.

I have mixed feelings about Chihuly’s things.  They are fascinating, and the documentary showing the way he works and where he draws his inspiration from was mesmerising.  I don’t know whether I could live with a piece though.

I know I’d worry myself sick about breaking it.

And they’re not small things:

I love the organic shapes he creates, and how fluid everything looks.  It is brave work, and the fact that he uses such a brittle, complex material to work with blows my mind.  The stuff reminds me of undersea worlds, or alien plant life, or things that have fallen from space.

I love the way it looks solid and yet ephemeral, and despite the gargantuan size of everything he seems to do, it can still have a fragile beauty to it:

While we were gawking, we wandered into a room filled with this:

It was an installation on a black glass floating floor.  Dimension wise we’re probably talking 15 feet long by 8 feet wide.

While we were walking around it, this chap came into the room ahead of us.  I watched as he calmly reached over to one of the green, spiky fronds that made up part of the installation, and pulled it really hard.

When it didn’t move, he did it again.  As calm as you like.

By now I had nudged Gina and we were both watching him in horrified silence.

He moved around to the back of the sculpture where an enormous glass ball was resting behind all the other fragile, skittle like shapes.

He reached over and pushed it.

Twice.

For luck.

Amazingly the whole lot stayed in one place and did not come crashing down like a house of cards.

Sometimes you wonder why they have such fierce guards in most major art galleries.  Then something like this happens and you totally get it.

The sculpture the man was happily tugging away at was a cool £300,000.

If I had done that you could bet your boots I’d be weeping in a pile of very expensive glass shards about now.

Just watching him made me sweat.

I was still thinking about it half an hour later when we managed to find a Patisserie Valerie with a spare table and some eclairs going begging, particularly after one of the waitresses banged into our table trying to navigate a narrow space strewn with bags and stray feet.  She didn’t pour tea into my crotch, but it was a narrow miss, and I winced extra hard at the memory of the bloke and his glass fondling ways.

A day of happy non accidents I am glad to report.

After all that excitement and a trip to Rococo to stock up on chocolate supplies, we kissed and parted with a promise to meet up very soon and be equally extravagant in our doings.

Sated with art and cake, I wended my way over to Keith and Noreen’s for a fabulous supper of smoked duck, freshly baked bread and the biggest salad in Europe, followed by raspberry trifle.  The lot washed down with a couple of glasses of a very acceptable red wine.

If you are interested in risking your luck with Chihuly, the exhibition is free to visit, and runs until 31 March.