And Sunday brunch (so-called because earlier I made a point to have this every Sunday) - a lifetime's worth of sin, manifest in baked beans, sautéed mushrooms, sausages, bacon, eggs and hashbrowns. With a generous dash of pepper to spice things up. Godsent on an early Sunday morning before the tills opened, as we wandered about town looking to fill our stomachs. Salvation we found, or starvation we averted, at The Nag's Head in Covent Garden.
After that we rambled down memory lane - Stanfords, 'the world's largest map and travel shop', Waterstone's and then Tesco's.
There is no greater thrill than stepping into Stanfords, where bookshops are concerned. The store has been at its present premises since 1873, when it started out as its printing room. There my twin passions of History and Travel were successfully married. Yet travel in the days of empire was not without its own political agenda. Indeed, Edward Stanfords started his maps business in 1853 with an eye firmly on supporting the expansion of the British Empire. For figures like Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton who we revere today for their unwavering stoicism in the face of adversity and for whom Stanfords offered the same succour as it did for me, travel was a measure of national and imperial virility.
Today it remains, for me at least, a nerve centre of travel, a trove of valuable information and a source of inspiration - be it from the pages of a Lonely Planet guidebook, a National Geographic collection of photographs or any tomes of Colin Thurbon, Robert Byron or Ranulph Fiennes. I think travel today has happily moved on from the heady days of possessive imperialism. However, a lot of ink will still be spilled on whether such attitudes invariably remain, as cultures from both First World and Third continue to meet and come to terms with each other.
Waterstone's we visited for old time's sake, Tesco's for more than purely nostalgia.
The last time I went about London with a camera ready at hand was my very first visit - October 2006. Doing so again seven years later provided many fresh perspectives, which I never quite bothered with on hurried steps between home and school.
There were shops I passed a hundred times without ever stepping in until today, Twinings being of them.
Twinings and the founding of modern Singapore
Tea, so inextricably tied up with Englishness, yet there isn't anything English about Oolong or Lapsang Souchong, which Twinings markets successfully today. The Strand store which we stepped inside was acquired in 1717 by the founder of the company, and has been in use since then. His grandson played an instrumental role in persuade Pitt the Elder to enact the Commutation Act, which reduced the tax on tea from 119% to 12.5%. Consequently, demand for tea soared, and British merchants duly flocked to China to satiate these demands and line their pockets. Only their pockets weren't lined, as the Chinese wanted only bullion in exchange for their tea leaves. The subsequent British attempt to circumvent this drain of bullion by looking for alternative products to trade for tea eventually led Raffles to Singapore.
Of course, none of this was apparent to us when we walked into the store. There we took advantage of dozens of tea leaf samples to reinvigorate ourselves as both the day and our energy levels waned.
Our last stop was Ye Olde Cock House, which might have been what kopitiam would pass for in Middle English, which brings us back to the start of this post. I eschewed the bangers, after one too many in the morning, and the ale provided good cheer after Cardiff City's last-gasp equalizer against Manchester United. It was a bracing walk past the Maugham Library and Chancery Lane to Holborn Station, before we flopped ourselves on the bed and into a half-day's slumber.
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