I Am a Polar Bear

Perhaps this should be a post about all the cosy things you can do in autumn in London – kicking red-gold leaves, PSLs in old-fashioned pubs with open fires, where to buy brown and orange knitwear or hand-made candles… but that’s not what autumn in the UK looks like. Autumn in London is grey and wet and so this is a more realistic itinerary of what to do in our vibrant capital on a distinctly non-vibrant October weekend.

Where I stayed

I’m not going to recommend accommodation – people have such different budgets, preferences and preferred locations. Your thing might be Claridges, or the Premier Inn in Brixton or a dorm in a hostel. All valid choices, although it’s only the ultimate top budget options that might decorate with an autumnal theme so if that’s important to you, be prepared to splash the cash.

I stayed at Pax Lodge, the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts’ World Centre in Hampstead because technically this was a Girlguiding region trip. However, the extent of the “trip” was that they’d booked some rooms in Pax Lodge and would give you a badge and everything else was up to you. £76 for two nights in London plus a badge was too good an offer to turn down!

I was in a family room with two other leaders. We had a single bed on one side and a double bed with a single bunk bed over it on the other. When I arrived, the others’ luggage was in there but as one of the suitcases had a sticker with the room number of it, I wondered if actually, they’d left their luggage and volunteers had brought it up once the room was ready. In which case, none of the beds were claimed and the cases, just in the middle of the floor, were no indication. When I got back on Friday evening, their stuff was on the double bed and the bunk bed which left me the single bed, which suited me down to the ground. We also had a small ensuite bathroom, which didn’t suit me – when sharing with strangers, I’d far rather have the big bathroom out in the hall shared with the rest of the floor. The other leaders’ group poked their head in once to admire the room and apparently we were quite lucky in that we had a TV, because their room didn’t have such a thing.

Pax Lodge can, in itself, keep you busy – you can opt to join the daily Flag Ceremony, do a Pinning Ceremony (get given an exclusive pin badge in exchange for an oath not to sell it or give it away), do the Pax Lodge Challenge or do any of their self-guided London challenges. Now, I’ve been Pinned four or five times and now have two pins. I did the Pax Lodge Challenge in 2017 and I’ve already got both their London challenge badges so I opted to just entertain myself for the weekend.

What I did on Friday

I got on the train in the cool light of fairly early morning, arrived in London by about 11.30am and went straight to the Guide shop.

That’s a reflex – there wasn’t really anything I needed but it had occurred to me that my uniform hoodie has shrunk quite badly and now leaves 6-8 inches of polo shirt visible underneath it. While I was there, I also got some badges for my Rangers and a Queen’s Guide record book.

Then, since CHQ is on Buckingham Palace Road, I thought I’d walk past the Palace and through the park to Green Park station instead of walking back to Victoria. That wasn’t exactly a mistake but it’s been so long since I’ve been up this way that I really underestimated how busy it was going to be. Where you’d previously wander fairly freely outside Buckingham Palace, you’re now corralled into walkways with barriers at all points to make sure you can only get into the road at the police-guarded traffic lights. Is this normal these days or was something going on? Certainly a band in red military uniform marched by, not playing music, followed by horses and with a police escort but for all the pomp and circumstance, no one paid them any attention. Were they on their way somewhere? Were they on their way back from somewhere? My phone was no help – it simply would not work. Just enough signal to not tell me it was being blocked but not enough to do anything useful.

I took the Tube up to Covent Garden – well, Leicester Square, actually. It’s marginally quieter there and you can just walk out, rather than queue with a million other people for the lists. I walked up Long Acre, popping into Lush, back to Long Acre through TK Maxx after leaving by the back door, into Swarovski and straight out again and finally up to Stanfords, which is a big map and book shop. It used to be on Long Acre – if you go to Lush and look up, you can see that the original building was built specifically for Stanfords.

In 2019, it moved 200m up the road and around the corner to a smaller and much less prestigious home on Langley Street. The maps that used to cover the three floors are gone and the contents definitely feel a lot more squished in than they used to. I was after a guidebook to Budapest because I’ll be going there a week tomorrow and since they keep local literature with the guidebooks and maps, I came home with an actual Hungarian book – Iza’s Ballad by Magda Szabó

By then, the 45l backpack full of stuff I absolutely did not need was starting to pull at my shoulders so I decided to go to Pax Lodge up at Hampstead to drop it off, change out of my uniform and promptly headed off on the Overground to Stratford, whence I took the Tube to North Greenwich for a ride on the Clipper. I love the Clipper – it’s a fleet of long low catamarans running a commuter route using contactless payment like the rest of TfL, although you can buy a paper ticket if you prefer. Last time I took the Clipper it was operated by MBNA but now it’s Uber Boat. New branding but otherwise a pretty similar service. I love the feeling of speed, especially as it rounds the o2 towards Greenwich and the Cutty Sark.

I disembarked at Canary Wharf. You don’t want to go too much further than that, really. Once you reach Tower Bridge, the strict speed limits kick in and after flying from North Greenwich, you crawl the rest of the way. So I made my way through the new financial district and got on the DLR to Bank. I am a child. I will never be tired of sitting in the front and pretending to drive the driverless train.

Then I had some time to kill before my 6pm appointment at Little Georgia, the Georgian restaurant in Islington. I arrived at Angel by about 4.45, so I took the bus back to Oxford Street and then the Tube back to Highbury & Islington, at which point I discovered it’s about 25 minutes to walk back to Angel and to Little Georgia, so I walked part of the way until I reached a bus stop with a bus coming within a few minutes.

I don’t think I’ve ever been to a restaurant in London. The most I’ve ever managed is Wetherspoon’s. But because I went to Tbilisi in January and because I had a supra (a wedding feast) imposed on me two days in a row, I discovered Imeruli khachapuri, which is pretty much a cheese pizza, so off I went to Little Georgia for a khachapuri! It’s not much of a step up from a Wetherspoons cheese panini but take it as personal growth.

I got back to find a group of people I knew or half-knew sitting in the US & Canada rooms playing card games so I joined them. I didn’t win at any of the three or four games of Uno Flip  but I acquitted myself well at 10 Clues, which is a trivia game where you have to name the thing/place/person within ten clues.

What I did on Saturday

We started Saturday with a group photo, a flag ceremony and a Pinning Ceremony. Considering there were no formal official plans, I think pretty much all of the 53 of us got the message somehow or other, so we had our photo, the Pax Lodge volunteers led the daily flag ceremony and then those of us who’d booked it were Pinned. We wondered if a few people who hadn’t also got Pinned, since the volunteers were handing them out willy-nilly without even counting, but I turned it down on the grounds of already being Pinned, as did someone three people to my right, and two people on my left refused because they hadn’t booked or paid for it.

Then I joined the groups I’d been playing games with last night to walk down to Belsize Park to get the Tube together. They were going to Tottenham Court Road and I was going to Embankment so we travelled that far together and then parted ways. I was going back to the Guide shop. I’d volunteered to get my local Rainbow unit some stuff before their enrolments on Monday but hadn’t mentioned I’d be there Friday morning so they didn’t send me the list until after I’d left the shop. So I got their stuff and got some stuff for my roommates.

With that ticked off, I went to Southwark Cathedral. My “Before It Burns Down” project has sort of faded away a bit but Southwark is one easily-accessible cathedral that I hadn’t bothered to tick off because I thought it was small and boring, promoted beyond its status. Actually, it’s really good! It’s not small – I mean, it’s not on the scale of Winchester, York or Canterbury but it’s big enough and it’s magnificently Gothic with just a hint of Norman remaining. Why haven’t I bothered to go here before? This is a great cathedral!

Now it was time to head north for a Turkish hammam. I hadn’t realised how far north – it’s an Overground job, three-quarters of the way to Cheshunt and less than three miles from Chingford. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting but not a plastic shower cap, to be worn everywhere except the shower. There’s a freezing little swimming pool lurking down a short corridor, a sauna, a steam room, a cold room, a spa pool and then the hammam itself, where you lie topless on a big stone slab and a woman – well, on Saturdays which is ladies’ day – scrubs you until your skin is red and covered in little beads of grey filth, throws hot water over you, then produces a bag which makes bubbles and massages you before throwing hot water over you again. It was pretty similar to the kisa scrub I had in Georgia but this was in a room with two other people having the same treatment.

It was over an hour back to Pax Lodge from there via two Overground trains that weren’t quite as linked as Google Maps told me they were. I left my wet swimming stuff, changing into a dress and tights and ran out again.

I finished Saturday up with a musical. I’m not a musicals sort of girl as a general thing – if I’m in a theatre, it’s far more likely to be for a touring stand-up comedy show but I figured I was spending a weekend in London for the first time in a while and what better to do in London than go and see a West End show? I’ve had half an eye on Hadestown for a while, ever since Brogan Tate went and saw it. I was a bit of a Greek mythology fan as a child and it appealed. The Lyric Theatre has clearly taken a few too many lessons from Ryanair as regards squishing too many seats in too little space but the show itself was good – I was especially taken by the circular rotating stage, which could take its cast literally down to Hades or become a treadmill for them to trek all the way out to Hadestown or just spin around dramatically while singing and dancing. I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that I was going to have to walk 600m home on my own from Belsize Park afterwards but it was fine. Walking around Leicester Square by night is no more scary or dangerous than walking around by day but Belsize Park is much quieter and more genteel – which is exactly why it was fine!

What I did on Sunday

If it had been July or August, I would probably have started Sunday with a quick jaunt over to Hampstead Heath, since Pax Lodge is right there in Hampstead, and gone for a dip in the Bathing Ponds. Since it’s October, no thank you.

Sunday was leaving day so I packed up and lay on my bed until the group were ready to go. We were all going to go to Waterloo together to leave our luggage in the lockers – right up until we discovered it wasn’t a price for a locker which they could cram all their stuff into (they were departing London two hours before me) but a price per item and that price was £15. I concluded that my backpack wasn’t £15 worth of annoying; they decided their suitcases were. So with the luggage sorted, they went off for a boat trip and I went off to Stratford to swim at the Olympic pool. However, the 50m pool was in use so off I went to the 25m training pool. This about seven lanes wide but only two were in use for lane swimming, the others being used by swimming lessons or parent-and-baby sessions, which meant far too many people getting in each others’ way. I did my 66 lengths, just over a mile, in just under an hour and a half which is seriously slow. But then, there were a lot of people there and I was quite badly out of practice, it being nearly a month since my last swim, which was a Full Moon Swim in a really cold outdoor pool.

I ran into Westfield for Subway for lunch and then straight out again because it was chaotically busy. I found Stratford International, “drove” the DLR to Stratford where I got on a really busy Jubilee line train to North Greenwich and then went on the cable car. I just touched in with my card and got straight on – you can mess around buying tickets from the desk or you can use your contactless/Oyster card. I was ushered into a cabin with two men who were doing a round trip but when we got to the other side, they jumped off and staff didn’t usher anyone into my cabin so I had it all to myself. It probably takes ten or fifteen minutes to do a circuit and gives you views all the way over East London – it goes ludicrously high over the river. It used to have commentary telling you what to look at and what you’re seeing but that seems to be gone with the new operators – yes, this one has rebranded since I was last on it too. The Emirates Air Line has become the IFS Cloud.

Once I got back to North Greenwich, I got back on the Clipper, this time to go all the way back to Waterloo. Once you slow down at Tower Bridge, you don’t get the same thrill ride but it’s a good way to see the sights of central London and it’s much cheaper than any other boat tour.

I had an hour and a half to waste back at Waterloo so I went for a drink (“until it all blows over”; see the I’d Survive a Zombie Apocalypse badge) and some garlic bread and then explored the new (and still not fully open) Sidings, which is underneath the old Eurostar platforms. There’s a shiny if hidden Wetherspoons, a Nandos, a Brewdog, a few shops and, at the moment, a lot of empty space. It’s also echoingly quiet – whether that’s because it’s Sunday afternoon or whether it’s because no one knows it’s there, I have no idea.

Then it was train time. It’s a weird train – 9 carriages to Salisbury, then it splits and just 3 carry on all the way to Exeter. 3 carriages all the way to Devon is not enough carriages. I admit, I had a grump when my neighbour moved to an empty seat and I got eight seconds of peace before someone else moved in, whereas the person in front of me, the person opposite me and the ex-neighbour diagonally opposite all got left alone, the former two all the way from London. Is there something about me that looks like I’ll be a pleasant person to sit next to on a train? I’m not. I will hate and resent you with all my heart. Go and sit next to someone else. That seat is taken until there’s not another seat left on the entire train.

That is partly my natural grumpiness and antisocialness and partly the result of not sleeping for the last several nights. For the sake of being nice, I won’t tell you about the nights at Pax Lodge except that I’m reminded I’m too old to share a room with other people and that I need it to be dark to sleep. But the days were great! The days were packed and although when I list what I did, it doesn’t come out much, it all adds up to a lot more than the sum of its parts. In short, I need more weekends in London and to not pack them quite so much when they’re few and far between.