Tuesday 24 April 2012

Weekend in London, and an evening with the Tyrones

What a lovely wife I have. For my birthday she treated me to a weekend break in London. We travelled up on the train and took the underground to Holborn and stayed at the The Doubletree Inn by Hilton. The room was at the back and was sold to us as being a quiet room. Well it was till about six thirty on Sunday morning when the laundry lorry showed up outside our window and started to unload the wire baskets with the clean laundry. The shower was excellent, very hot and plenty of water. The bed was extremely comfortable and Sunday morning breakfast was all you could eat, started at 0600am. I had grapefruit juice, scrambled eggs, toast, tea and marmalade finished off with a strawberry yoghurt. Nice addition to the hotel location was there is a Tesco mini market next door open till eleven at night, just perfect for a jug of juice.


 We managed to avoid the marathon by walking over to Goodge street and visited Pollocks toy museum. Several floors of antique toys catering mostly to the doll and teadybear afficenado.
Originally I  wanted to go to the London Toy Museum but that closed several years ago and all the toys went to China, another case of choose it or loose it, well our loss is their gain.
We spent the rest of the afternoon walking, yes I said walking up and down Oxford street, through Soho and ended up at our restaurant for our dinner. The food was hot and quite tasty and not overly expensive. I started with the soup, tomato with croutons and slivers of cheese, funny thing was it had a hint of Campbells about it. For the main I had salmon fish-cake, very tasty. I completed my meal, Nancy shared, a slice of cheesecake and a cappuccino. Nancy started with parma ham and rocket with sun ripened tomatoes and for a main she had Linguini and seafood.


Next it was off across the road to The Apollo Theatre to see Eugene O'Neil's play, Long Day's Journey Into Night. The cast was very good
and worked well together. What a roller coast of emotions I experienced as I watched a family I had never met go from strangers to people that I will never forget. It is a pity that today's society hasn't learned any lessons about drugs and alcohol and the insipid destruction it can bring.

Of course the highlight for me was to see David Suchet on stage acting the part of James Tyrone and the pièce de résistance was to go back stage after the show and meet David Suchet in person and have our picture taken with him, what a lovely man.

                                                  
Sunday after breakfast we took the underground to Nottinghill gate underground and walked over to  the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising, brought back lots of memories.


For lunch on Sunday afternoon we went to Byron's in Central St Giles. The service was given with a smile. The burgers are probably the best I have tasted outside the USA, I don't consider the greasy, shriveled up mess sold by the high street chains proper burgers. Try one at Byron's the next time you are up in the smoke, you'll be delighted. They have restaurants at several locations around the city.