London, with a bullet

• Free train wifi! First time I've been on a long-distance train journey since I got my netbook. I now very much approve of free train wifi. And booking seats next to plug sockets.
  
• Train lurching to a halt at Doncaster and all the lights going out. In Luckily, we were not made to abandon train and hang around in Doncaster station, nor were we attacked by zombies. (Of the two options, I would have preferred zombies)
  
  
• Catching up with all my immediate London family (apart from my eldest cousin who managed to avoid me through the cunning ploy of leaving the country completely for the whole weekend! In fine family tradition she is hectically busy and needs to be booked several months in advance...) and instantly travelling back in time about 15 years to when I used to see them every summer
  
• Sitting in the garden of my Aunt and Uncle's house looking at the crab apple trees at the end, remembering my cousin and I making mud-and-rotten-apple pies and trying to convince my brother to eat them (we were about 5 at the time...)
  
• Girls night out at a nice Italian with my Aunt and youngest cousin
  
• All night drinking session with my middle 'little cousin' (In my mind he's still a 10-year-old rushing round on his bike round washing all the neighbours' cars for extra pocket money. In reality he's now a hard living city banker type. I should not be trying to out-drink hard living city bankers. Just because I can doesn't mean that I should.)
  
• Going to bed on my cousin's settee at 7am. Waking up at 8am as he had to go to work. Eating breakfast at my Aunt and Uncle's at 9am. Going to bed there at 10am. Waking up at 11am to get a train into town.
  
  
• My first ever Oyster card! (Still have it, for next time)
  
• Realising that I never told the person I'd bought boots off what I looked like, so having to hang round Angel tube station looking like the kind of person that was there to pick up boots (it worked!)
  
• New boots! Shinyshinyshiny! AND spiky!
  
• Realising that the hotel was not, as I believed, just round the corner from the Angel. The START of the street the hotel was on was just round the corner from the station. It was a long street.
  
• Discovering that the 'exotic tea and liqueur bar' that sounded so intriguing when I booked was in fact a couple of boxes of fruit tees and a few flavoured shot bottles on a shelf behind the receptionist's head
  
• Discovering that the hotel wasn't 100% built (or at least refurbished) yet
  
• Having to explain to reception no less than 3 times that lights are quite a handy thing in a basement room and so could the builders stop taking the electricity away, please?
  
  
• SEL!!!
  
• Victorian prostitutes FROM THE FUTURE!!!!!! (AKA steamstrumpet)
  
• New boots! eating my feet in a most impolite fashion
  
• Medicating my poor boot-eaten feet by means of (a) alcohol and (b) keeping the boots ON and walking the entire length of long street back towards the Angel. (b) made sense after (a)
  
• Trying and failing to explain Victorian prostitutes FROM THE FUTURE!!!!!! to various people including stalkers, crazy-loud European party girls, crazy-scary-is-she-going-to-stab-us Londoners and a nice Irish bloke who Sel adopted
  
• Failing to eat until 1am when we discovered hotdogs.
  
• Failing to find anything to do apart from eat hotdogs AFTER 1am. Islington is not quite as bad as Nottingham, but it tries...
  
• Following the trail of feather boa feathers home (far better than breadcrumbs!)
  
  
• Another early start as Sel needed to see her Auntie and I needed her help in negotiating buses to avoid long walk back to tube station on crippled feet
  
• Sitting outside Euston station close to tears trying to work out how to get me and a large case to meet Yana and then on to Ellie's house when (a) I didn't even know where Ellie lived and (b) the entire London underground appeared to be broken, closed, or at the bottom of infinite flights of stairs. (I am hugely confident about navigating round London as long as I can use tube stations to do it. Take them away and you might as well just nail my feet to the pavement.)
  
• Being more ridiculously happy to actually arrive at Kings Cross than any sane human being should ever be (turns out the Underground wasn't complely dead, just faking it)
  
• Everything going a bit Whitby (ie made it to pub, ordered large amounts of food as a substitute for sleep, and pint of lager shandy on the grounds that both additional alcohol AND sudden removal of alcohol were likely to kill me. Shandy dances between the two. This is pretty standard procedure on a Whitby Saturday)
  
• Being introduced to Big Red, which is now officially one of my favourite pub-type-things ever (this actually happened before the previous point, but it needed the food to work its way into my system and the panic to work its way out of it before I could appreciate it properly)
  
  
• YANA!!! and CORINNE!!! in tandem!!!!!!
  
• Getting very confused by the fact that Corinne and Yana, who I had been planning on introducing to one another, somehow not only knew each other, but were keeping each other updated on my movements (turns out that they'd met for the first time at a party the night before, and in one of those bizarre coincidences that happen all the time both got talking about having a friend visiting from Leeds the next day...)
  
• Also meeting a Tom and a Kitty (and much later on a Mr Ed)
  
• Rambling filty conversation that corrupted my poor innocent mind. Although Yana said it was her poor innocent mind. I blame Eeyore. Although I think we blamed it all on Kris in the end
  
• Strange and enticing things in the condom machines - even better than the Whitby snake!
  
• Camden is dead! Long live Holloway Road! Or something like that...
  
• Sitting outside other pub drinking wine in the sunshine - could have stayed there forever but people had places to be and I had to track down my wife
  
  
• ELLIE!!! (My first and number one wife, worth many camels!)
  
• Death-country-lounge-polka-metal-rock band appearing oin stage, several of whom were dressed as skeletons (of course, it might just have been in my head, as it had all gone VERY Whitby at that point, but Ellie swears she saw them too)
  
• Discovering that Ellie lives (in metaphorical London terms) just round the corner from my Aunt and Uncle, and that I could have done a lot less criss-crossing of metropolei if I'd only thought to ask that a bit earlier!
  
• Having to fall over and fall asleep after only an hour or so sitting up talking back at Ellie's. Feeling guilty about this until I found out Ellie was relieved as she remembered all the times Vix and I refused to sleep until dawn and thought she was going to have to step into Vix's role, and wasn't looking forward to it!
  
• Meeting all of Ellie's household, including the fabulous bread (and cake, and doughnut) fairy
  
• Meeting Ellie's guard-plant, whose name I have forgotten
  
• Fresh and juicy plums!
  
• The white sundress!
  
• Failing to make trains do my bidding, and-consolation prize milkshakes
  
  
• Alice and mini-me-Alice!!!
  
• Playing in the fountain spray in Trafalgar Square
  
• Finding out that my big camera, that I had faithfully lugged all round London, had a corrupted memory card. Taking photos on my phone instead
  
• Plinth people failing to entertain (booooo!)
  
• Ice creams and brass bands playing Indiana Jones in St James Park (any rumours that I spilled more ice-cream down myself than baby Izzy did are foul insidious lies! Luckily being a mum, Alice always carries military-operation-level-supplies of wetwipes)
  
• The injustices of the rodent world (People were going 'ooooooh!' at a squirrel in a flowerbed, which turned to 'urgh!' when a rat appeared. People only love you if your tail is fluffy. If rats realised this I could make a fortune selling them bottle brushes and string)
  
  
• Going for one last drink with Ellie before my train, which turned into a meal and a bottle of wine
  
• Struggling to get exceedingly heavy full-of-boots suitcase back up stairs from cellar bar after bottle of wine
  
• Extreme escalator surfing (ie with exceedingly heavy full-of-boots suitcase after bottle of wine)
  
• Making it to the station in the nick of time only to find that my train hadn't, so having to sit around for an hour (on exceedingly heavy full-of-boots suitcase)
  
• Coming home with a bagful of wasabi peas, which I re-discovered several weeks later...

So totally failed to do any museums, galleries, portfolio showings or any of the other cultural or career stuff I had planned. But did get to catch up on a lot of people I haven't seen in WAY too long, as well as meet some new ones. Definitely heading back South again soon...