A “Barney” in London
April 25th, 2008 at 19:30
My friend Barney is currently on his gap year, but rather than faff about in an impoverished third world hell-hole, he’s done the wise thing, and taken a gap year travelling around Britain (I told him to give Birmingham a miss to make sure that he definitely avoids hell-holes). He’s been in London for the past week, so on Wednesday, I went down there for the day to meet up with him, just for the fun of it.
As you might have noticed – I liveblogged a lot of it on Twitter and my blog’s sidebar.
I met up with him in Trafalgar Square, where, as it transpired, were some sort of St George’s Day celebrations – whilst this display of patriotism obviously sickened me, I was delighted to spot Giles Dilnot from the Daily Politics doing a live OB.
Anyway, after a wander around London we eventually ended up the Sir John Soane museum – he was the architect who designed the Bank of England and loads of other stuff. What was unusual about it, was that aside from it being a small museum (it was Soane’s old house), you had to wait outside for someone to let you in, and then had to sign in, which made it feel all the more exclusive.
You could tell it was an old house – the walls were caked in tat, like all of the paintings and old Roman stuff he’d collected. There was a bit towards the back where there were loads of old Roman head statues overhanging a drop down to where there was some sort of old sarcophagus – it was unbelievably tempting to push them off, but somehow I managed to resist the urge.
After this, and a brief jaunt to the British Museum, we headed to the spiritual home of PKMN.NET meet-ups (this is how I know Barney), The Rocket, where we met up with Mushroom (or “William” as he’s also known). He was somewhat startled when I phoned him and asked if he wanted to go to the pub, considering that both Barney and I both live over 100 miles away from London, in different directions.
After this we headed to another pub, which was something of a personal triumph for us. Only a couple of people reading this will appreciate the significance that we found “The Shakespeare Pub”! On previous trips to London, we’ve (well, I’ve) consisted failed to find The George Inn, which is thought to have been Shakespeare’s and Charles Dicken’s local pub. Considering we were there on April 23rd, it seemed particularly relevant, as it was not only St George’s Day, but Shakespeare’s birthday and death day. It was literally the most relevant place in the world to be at that time.
(Wearing someone else’s hat doesn’t mean that I endorse St George’s Day or the volkisch concept of ‘patriotism’.)
After leaving this pub, we ended up encountering some Morris Dancers just before heading to the pub next to The Golden Hind – the, er, fourth pub of the day, which was the other spiritual home of PKMN.NET meet-ups. Barney bought four pints of a specific drink just to get a free St George’s Day hat. Just goes to show that marketing works.
The Morris Dancers were appalling, have a watch of this:
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