Being a weekend, London Underground took the opportunity to shut down as much as possible of the network including Tower Hill. But this left a pleasant enough walk on a sunny morning down the Minories.
But the really amazing thing, compared to my previous visits to this tourist honey-pot, was that the place was almost empty. For example, on my last visit the queue to the Crown Jewels was all the way down the central square. Here we walked straight in and indeed were almost on our own. Apart from an American couple who exclaimed "That can't be a real diamond". Ok its big, but its the crown jewels dear. The economy isn't quite so bad that the Royal Family are down to throwing in some costume jewellery to fill in the regalia.
Anyway, look here and you will see the emptiest Tower will be, outside the end of the world. Just so much a contrast to Monday. You actually want to look at things when they aren't utterly obscured by people.
Anyway, it was a lovely day. Just the right temperature for walking around. We had a nice mid-morning coffee break in the for once not utterly heaving cafe. I had brought along the "bucket list" the National Trust had just done. You may have seen this in the news. Couldn't be more apposite for a boy about to turn 12 since it was 50 things you should do before you are eleven and three-quarters. Its quite a fun list to analyse as its really all the things a middle-class child in the 1950s might do - an Enid Blyton world. (And funnily enough I guess just about the childhood of those who now run the NT.) So things like explore a rockpool, climb a tree, roll down a hill, start a snail race, make a mud pie, run around in the rain. All to help commune with nature. The bits that especially mark out the middle-class status of it are things like standing behind a waterfall - waterfalls not being things which are abundant where most of us live, but no doubt fine on your family holiday in Wales, the Lake District or Scotland. In the 1950s.
Young Tom however scored pretty well. Despite being a well-adjusted kid of the 21st century. We had a nice chat about the Chemical Brothers. Funnily enough no room for dubstep on the NT list.
We then did the last bits in the Tower (including the torture exhibition. Always intrigued me how we were at our most beastly to our fellow men just at the time we were most pious in religious observation. Indeed being caught doing the wrong bit of worship seemed the main justification for having your limbs mangled in the most gruesome manner imagineable. And on that score they did seem to have fertile imaginations.) By that time we were eager to go to neighbouring St Katharine's Dock for some lunch. We found a very nice (and completely empty) Italian restaurant for lunch (nice to take Tom somewhere adult rather than "child-friendly" - usually code for cheap and grotty). Impressed he went for the warm octopus salad as a starter. I know at his age I would have turned my nose up at any invertebrate. Or anything vaguely exotic. (Although to be fair we never really ate out when I was young so the situation wouldn't have arisen.)
Then we went for a walk a little further down docklands and used one of the little side alleys to go down onto the Thames foreshore. Its only at low-tide like this you realise just how tidal the Thames is. Using the green slime on the walls as a comparison point its obviously comfortably more than 10 feet from high to low tide. I am sure investigating the foreshore should have been on that NT list, but mud larking would seem a little too common. And in the 1950s an urban river would have equated to a sewer.
So, a great laugh really. How I like spending a day. Nothing serious, just fun. And home in time to watch the re-run of the first Cup semi-final. Without knowing the result. Perfect. (Well apart from the result. Difficult to work out which of Chelsea and Liverpool one wants to lose the final most....)
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