Saturday in London

The Fab Four Crossing Abbey Road

After a full week in London stalking the halls of vaunted museums, doing school work, and criss-crossing this grand old city, we decided that a more laid-back day was in order.  How would we spend our Saturday if we were back home and not rambling the lower UK?  Let’s see, I’m an early riser, so I would be up, showered, and drinking coffee before anyone else in the crew even considered changing position in bed.  Deena would be up eventually due to my making some racket under the pretense of moving our household in a positive direction but in reality just making noise to wake someone up to relieve my loneliness.  Joseph would sleep late, but like the Sirens in the Odyssey, the call of ESPN would become too strong and he could not resist.  Deveny would sleep all day and curse those that would pull her from her chamber into the light.  Deena and I would eventually wind up sitting on the couch drinking tea and coffee, talking about all the yard work and other chores that need doing, then eventually running out of time to do them and just going out to eat—perfect Saturday!

I got up early and showered, soon followed by Deena—pleased that we’re getting the hang of the temperamental hand-held shower tool, and resigned to the fact we’re sharing it with eight other people.  Our flat in Stepney Green was originally a three-bedroom, one-bath apartment, but through the auspices of AirBnB, the owner has converted the space into a four-bedroom hostel.  The owner manages a bunch of other properties through AirBnB in the same way and seems to have a pretty good setup going for himself.  So, we share the bathroom and kitchen with whoever else might be staying here at the time, and it’s working out pretty well.  We’re here for two weeks, while most guests just stay for a few days—we feel a bit like the RA's for the building.  Everyone we’ve encountered here has been cordial and respectful of others’ space, but they’ve kept to themselves for the most part.  We haven’t been able to strike up any conversations beyond the the state of the weather.

We managed to be up, dressed, and fed by twelve or so, and we were off to see what kind of fun we could scare up on a Saturday afternoon in London.  Joseph finally consented to let his mother cut his hair in the current style of hip London men, but it needed touching up a bit; so one of our goals for the day was to find a tattoo parlor to get Deveny’s nose pierced because she talked us into it, but it looks really cool, sorry Grandma Leah and Grandma Shirley salon or barbershop where we could get him trimmed up.  We had a few other goals for later in the day, so we planned a progression of stops on the tube to accomplish our agenda.  

We ended up on Portobello Road in the Nottting Hill section of London right smack in the middle of a huge, bustling street market.  Talk about serendipity, we hit the jackpot on this trip.  I’m guesstimating that the market stretched out for about a mile along Portobello Road, which was closed off for the event; and the street was packed with vendors, performers, and Londoners enjoying their Saturday.  We found a place to sit for a while and ate the turkey and avocado sandwiches we had packed for lunch.  Dessert was a sumptuous banana and nutella crepe prepared right in front of us by a street vendor.  As he laced the steaming crepe with chocolate sauce and dusted it with powdered sugar, he told us we were his second group of customers from North Carolina that day—small world I guess.

We wandered into a t-shirt shop dedicated to Banksy, a mysterious British-born graffiti artist whose work has gained worldwide acclaim due to its satirical and political nature—plus the dude is really talented.  Deveny has been a big fan of Banksy for a while, so when the proprietor of the shop told us there was a Banksy piece still located on a red brick building at the top of the market, I determined that my new mission for the day was to get my daughter in front of that sucker.  We got a reference for a barbershop nearby, and while Deena stayed with Joseph for his haircut, Deveny and I hit the streets in search of Banksy.  Thanks to chump directions from the t-shirt lady, we walked about half a mile in the wrong direction until being corrected by an art-gallery owner who pointed us the other way.  On a positive note, we got to see all the vendors along the whole length of the market during our trek.  We needed to find the corner of Portobello Road and Ackel Road, and while trying to figure out the crazy route Google was providing, we looked up, and the junction was right in front of us, good grief.  We walked past the corner and there on the building right behind a bunch of junk a vendor had piled up, was the Banksy piece in all its glory.  Deveny was thrilled to have found it, and we snapped a bunch of pics before heading back to meet Deena and Joseph with his fresh London buzz.  We may have stumbled upon The Portobello Market, but our next stop was completely planned.

Banksy Wall

I love the Beatles, and I never tire of their timeless music.  Abbey Road is my favorite Beatles album, and it is included in my top-ten favorite albums list…in the world…of all time…amen.  The cover of the Abbey Road album is a photo of the lads crossing the road in front of the Abbey Road Studios where they recorded all their albums.  While not the most creative idea for an album cover, the photo has become one of the most iconic images in rock and roll, and even my fourteen year old daughter has a poster of it in her room back home.  One of my major goals while in England, right up there with visiting Stonehenge, was to get a photograph of my family strolling this legendary crosswalk.  We took the tube up to north London near Primrose Hill and made our way to Abbey Road.  I equated my excitement level with that of the children as they waited to be photographed at platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross Station.  There are no traffic signals at the crosswalk, and Beatles fans take pictures at their own risk and peril as the local drivers show no mercy—I’m sure they must get tried of avoiding goofy tourists posing in the middle of the street.  Because it was Saturday, the traffic volume was not very heavy, and thanks to a friendly Chinese lady who accepted my request to be our photographer, I got a KILLER picture of my family crossing Abbey Road, proudly displayed at the top of the page.  The order in which we crossed was not random, and Deveny went barefoot in honor of Sir Paul.  There is also a webcam geocache located on this hallowed ground, and with webcam caches being a rarity in the geocaching world, I just had to score that find as well.  I went to Abbey Road with my family, and all my wildest dreams came true.

Back in Stepney Green, we located a takeout fish-and-chip establishment and placed an order for dinner.  The guy behind the counter was a real character who made assembling suppers an art form.  He started by placing a golden brown, steaming cod filet at the center of a large piece of heavy butcher paper.  He then covered the cod with three huge scoops of crispy hot chips and doused the whole glorious pile with malt vinegar and finished with a shower of salt.  To preserve the heat, he wrapped everything up tightly into a square package of English-culinary-guilty pleasure.  I made a mental note to double up on my cholesterol medication later that evening.  We initially placed four orders, and I quickly realized two would suffice, but I got a third one just so I could watch this fish-and-chip artist perform his act one more time.  While stuffing our temporary British faces with the local fodder back at the flat, we enjoyed talking about our Saturday in London, and we didn’t even have to do yard work when we got home.