Day 23: Thursday 10 April - London, by Ken

A quiet first full day in England.

While Jane caught up on the backlog of laundry I helped Sue and Richard restring their rotary clothes drier. It was a real committee effort with Sue directing operations and Richard and me applying some ingenuity in trying to replicate the original complex rigging. With the aid of some duct tape and some intricate lashings we had the job finished just as the first load of washing came out of the machine.

How Many People Does It Take to Restring a Clothes Line?

I was keen to get a UK SIM card for Jane’s iPhone and Sue and I walked the half mile or so to Carphone Warehouse on Chiswick High Road. It’s name dates back to the origin of the business, but these days it specialises in mobile phones and all the other mobile devices requiring access to the internet. Two years ago another branch of the Car Phone Warehouse had been very helpful in finding a good deal for us using the Three UK Network. This time round the assistant said Three was definitely the best for us, but they no longer sell the product. He pointed across the road to a Three outlet and suggested I go there.

Phouja, who hails from Madagascar, the assistant in the Three shop, couldn’t have been more helpful. As long as I had a UK debit card she could sort something out for me. While I had a NatWest debit card with me, I didn’t have the account details. That was resolved by Jane through a quick phone call and I settled on a contract that gave me a monthly allowance of 200 voice minutes, 5,000 UK texts and, most importantly all the data we can eat together with free roaming in some European countries. And all that came at a cost of £12.90 (NZ$25 approximately). It brings home just how expensive mobile phone usage is in New Zealand.

After a light lunch Jane and I walked down to the Thames and headed west as far as Fuller’s brewery before looping back to Prebend Gardens where we bought some gin and wine to top up Sue and Richard’s stocks.

Spring Time in London

Low Tide On The Thames

Thames Houseboats

Back with Sue she took us through all the photographs taken by a professional photographer at Caroline and Laurence’s wedding. All involved had put in a tremendous effort in dressing the church and reception venue. Both looked splendid and I took a copy of all the photos as I’m sure Ella and Harry would like to see them.

After dinner of fish pie Sue introduced us to two of her favourite TV programmes. Pointless and W1A.

Pointless is a quiz in which contestants try to score as few points as possible by plumbing the depths of their general knowledge to come up with the answers no-one else can think of. There answers are calibrated against the answers given by a 100 people prior to the programme, e.g. points in the 80s would be gained if the response to “name a president of the USA with an A in his name” is Obama, but few of the 100 people would have come up with Adams (the 2nd president).

W1A features Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey) as Ian Fletcher in a follow up to the fictional Olympic Deliverance Commission mockumentary. This was a piss take on a group of incompetents organising the London Olympics. We saw a few episodes when we were here in 2012 and it was very funny, e.g. Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony fireworks were going to trigger the Army’s ground-to-air missiles and start World War Three over east London.  In W1A Ian Fletcher has a new job as the "Head of Values" at the BBC and the series is just as funny as its predecessor. It’s refreshing the BBC can laugh at itself. If you are interested in an excerpt, take a look at: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01wpqhm