The current ”snow chaos” in Britain makes me very happy to be in sunny Helsinki instead of London right now although the weather conditions me and The Loved One experienced there three weeks ago weren’t exactly top notch either. London was in the grip of an unusually cold spell for the whole of five days we spent there at the start of January and the constant chattering of teeth and wearing of every single piece of clothing available slightly diminished the pleasure of visiting this otherwise a magnificent city. Also, the exchange rate of pound rocketed up during the last week before our trip after having steadily weakened for months. Still, in retrospect, it was a lovely trip to a city I’ve visited at least ten times before, the last time being on 2001, so it felt fresh and familiar at the same time. Personally I’ve changed considerably during the passing years so it was interesting to find out how much London had changed (not much) and if I still found the city to my liking (yes I did). This was the first time in London for The Loved One so my knowledge of the city and how to navigate therein proved very useful and it was nice to switch roles after she had showed me around in Fuengirola Spain (where her father lives) last year.

EasyJet took us to Gatwick Airport, the tickets had been outrageously cheap and the arrival time was outrageously late so I had booked us a room in a nearby hotel. Everything went very smoothly and an hour after the plane had landed we had already checked in and were heading for the hotel bar. The hotel was spacious and luxurious with art prints that reminded me of John Waterhouse on the corridors. Unfortunately it was for the one night only and the next day we travelled to London Victoria and checked in to a more traditional British hotel where the bed took up 85% of the available space and the room temperature was well below 20C at all times. The check in time was 11AM but the room still wasn’t ready when we arrived sometime after 1PM. The person at the reception desk stated very clearly that it was impossible to get more than two towels per room, there were no safety boxes and the cleaning lady left the window open every day for the chilling wind to blow in for the rest of the day until we left a note asking her not to do it again. All this for a bargain price of only 10 pounds more per night than in the luxurious airport hotel and absolutely no nice looking art prints on the walls whatsoever. The breakfast was served across the street in the smallest and most cramped cafe I have ever seen and as their continental breakfast was of the kind often described as ”most horrible”, we didn’t see it necessary to return there after the first morning. But that’s the way of the affordably-priced Central London hotels and we took it all with goodish grace.

As roaming the parks was out of the question we mostly spent our days alternately sitting around in cafes (wonderful cafe mochas in Caffe Nero and wonderful everything in Pret A Manger) and pubs, trying to find our way out of the Victoria Station, wandering the vast and endless halls of art galleries or tube stations and having dinners of various degrees of loveliness. On the whole it was a good trip and left in me a longing to return once the weather gets fairer. This might take a while to happen though and by this I mean returning (which will not happen in a while) and not the weather getting better (which will happen much sooner I assume). There’s all kinds of other cities to visit in Europe too, although with the current EasyJet flight-rates London is the easiest capital to pop out to.

It was good to find out my favourite bookstore was still there in Notting Hill. I often had two suitcases with me on previous trips to London and the other one got usually filled with books and comics I mostly purchased from Book & Comic Exchange. I took a much more reserved approach to hoarding stuff this time around but still found lots of books I wanted to buy, several of which I did. This will probably always be my favourite place to buy things in London.

Dali Universe is a too-large-to-take-in-at-one-go collection of Salvador Dalis’ works of all kinds, exhaustive and, towards the end, exhausting too. I was particularly impressed by the sculptures and works of coloured glass. I didn’t know he worked with/on such a wide array of materials and topics, including illustrations for The Bible, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Alice In Wonderland (although in latter case it’s not so surprising seeing how many people during the years have illustrated Alice). Also, his remakes of Francisco Goya’s works, presented next to original untouched pictures were fascinating. This exhibition wore us down in two hours and it would have been nice to return to it on another day which we did not do. Maybe next time. The gift shop was disappointing after having worked myself up to purchase all kinds of surreal things to take home, only to find out the stuff on sale at an affordable price consisted mostly of postcards and keyrings.

Tate Britain was, as can be expected, very exhausting as well. My favourite room was probably Room 8 with the William Blake and Cecil Collins paintings. This Cecil Collins person I hadn’t heard of before and was quite impressed by his works. I must delve deeper into the things he’s done when I have the time for it. ”The Music Of Dawn”, pictured below, held me in place, staring, for a long time. Countless other paintings impressed me greatly as well, some with the sheer size of them and some by the strongness of emotion they depicted. Raging or serene landscapes and scenes of biblical and/or mythological content are the things I enjoy the most. As opposed to The Loved One who yawned her way through some of the galleries where I stood gawping with my jaw hanging open.

This was reversed the next day when we visited Tate Modern where the things I found to my liking were few and far between. The ”Poetry and Dream”-section had some interesting stuff, like the short film ”Meshes Of The Afternoon”. It can be viewed here and is well worth watching in my opinion, lasting some 14 minutes. Otherwise, I mostly tittered at the abstract paintings and piles of bricks arranged on the floor and couldn’t bring myself to appreciate any possible meanings behind things like that.

It was nice to be able to buy wine from any supermarket at a reasonable price. Sainsbury’s had a very decent Albarino in their own "Taste The Difference" range, Tesco had a similar selection and then there were of course the wine merchants like Oddbins. In restaurants a bottle of wine didn’t cost much more than in a supermarket and that’s something I’d like to see happen in Finland too. I’m quite in favour of the current, centralized monopoly system where you can get everything you need in the same store specialised in selling alcoholic beverages but would like to see the pricing system in Finnish restaurants (the price of the bottle in Alko multiplied by six) change drastically.

Anyhow, we had some lovely, romantic and long dinners and the best one was on our final night in a Portuguese place in Knightsbridge called O Fado. it was favourably reviewed in Time Out restaurant guide and I was curious to find out what Portuguese cuisine was like. The waiter didn’t probably understand English at all, the wine he delivered wasn’t what I asked for and the bill included some surprising items like fries we didn’t order but got anyway, a set service charge that made sure we left enough tip and two cover charges, making the final balance to pay quite high. But I didn’t complain, I loved the food and the wrong wine and it was all very romantic with actual living people playing actual guitars in an actual dimly lit and nicely decorated low ceilinged cellar.

If we had had a few more days we would no doubt have had several more lovely dinners and possibly visited some musical too. Monty Python’s Spamalot had closed a few days before we arrived and I would very much have liked it to have been my virgin experience on musicals. I also missed Robert Rankin’s signing session at Forbidden Planet by a few days.

Oh and the awesome new Westminster Tube Station looks like an interior of a futuristic space ship! Check it out here, and here too!

Not many holiday photos this time I’m afraid. Here’s me, clinging to the limited warmth of a hotel room radiator, with all my clothes on including woollen socks, and another one of me, thoroughly enjoying my beer at the airport.