We’re in the Skinners Arms for about three hours, the TV screen over the bar looping between Andrew getting a colonoscopy without anaesthesia and journalists vying to affect the most authentic mix of shock and empathy, and… no one looked up, not a soul.
The bar’s humming now, if we’re to believe the barman, since 1763 (from about 4pm). It’s a back street bar somewhere near where we’re staying, around St Pancras. Just grey hairs at first, then the Thursday after-workers coming in for a pint. We’d planned to have a drink, then pick up some salads from Marks and Spencers but the age-old timber warmth of this place has us in a trance, and we go for the next best thing: three wines and honey-smoked ham, fried eggs, peas and chips (Di said, ‘hey, I had soup’, fair enough, I couldn’t though – it had wheat in it).
The wine draws down as we review the day. It started with a coffee recommendation from the receptionist, Spagnoletti’s, a funky little Italian place across from Kings Cross Station. So close to “Platform 9 3/4” we wandered over to take a look, with about 100, 000 others – absolutely nuts! A queue of a hundred people …to get a selfie in front of the 9 3/4 sign on the wall, and another queue (thankfully not so large when we arrived) to get into the inevitable Harry Potter 9 3/4 shop. It was a denser crowd heaving past rubber frogs, Griffyndor jumpers and elder wands than we’d experienced in Notre Dame (less rubber frogs in Notre Dame – and possibly less cash too). I saw a little girl tear up as the shop assistant opened a satin-lined box and presented her with Hermione’s wand, gorgeous.
A short walk up York Way across the canal to the post office, where Di sent off some cards and then we walked Regent’s canal as far as Camden, as I’d located an outdoor store there and my boot laces were falling apart. So, for want of better laces, we saw a beautiful little corner of London we wouldn’t have otherwise done. A floating book shop and a Taro card reader, coal fires (or so it smelt) warming the cosy inhabitants of colourful and idiosyncratic canal bargers with various arrays of ropes, pot plants, push bikes, deck chairs and assorted nautical-looking apparatus.
We were delighted to find that our backpacks, stored for ‘safe’ keeping at a dodgy little corner store up from St Pancras while we hung out in Montreux, were still there, intact. We were less pleased with the storeman’s joke that he should have charged us more because our backpacks were so big he had to put them in separate rooms – pah! More Yellowtail here Pete – what’s the world coming to?
