I’ve noticed there aren’t many photos today – just not enough exciting things that we (or you) haven’t seen before, I guess!

I shouldn’t have said anything about fire alarms. We had the joy of being woken up at 3:30 and again at 5:00. It’s now at the point they’ll need an alternative alarm to actually say yes you should leave – because this one is going off too often to do what it says. And yep, as I’m writing this just before 11PM, there it goes again. The trouble is all the accomodation is paid for so it’s not like we can easily switch hotels or anything.

After the very rude starts to the day I eventually woke up without the fire alarm’s help. We headed off to Pret for breakfast, where I’m happy to say that yes they have Flat White on the menu, nd it almost did the trick of waking me up. After that we also put some washing in to be done, for the last time I guess. Man it’ll be be convenient when a walk to the laundry is 5 steps not 5 minutes.

Our first appointment today wasn’t until 2:30 in the afternoon so we wandered into a more central bit of tourist-town (Oxford Circus) to look at touristy stuff and whatever else we came across. The Piccadilly line (or at least the bit we needed) was out of action but we found our way via the Bakerloo line. So named because it used to go from Baker St to Waterloo. Wandering downt the road from Oxford Circus, we discovered H&M have a ‘Home furnishings’ store, who knew! Nice coffee cups. Didn’t buy ‘em.

We continued wandering down to Leicester Square, where by now it was most definitely time to stop for ice cream. I was really pleasantly surprised that the Ben & Jerry’s in Leicester square, ripe for ripping off tourists, didn’t. It was about half the cost of what I was expecting, which is as nice as it is rare 🙂

With some time yet to go before 2PM we wandered around the markets at Covent Garden, saw some nice things that wouldn’t fit in the suitcase. I recommend pretending you have a suitcase whenever you go shopping, it stops you from buying things all the time when you really stop and think about what you can actually carry home.

Lunch was at that find tradition British institution, well, ok it was Burger King because it was in the right place at the right time. Nice enough burgers as always.

This brought us to 2PM and our first show for the day, down to the Prince of Wales theatre, to see The Book of Mormon. This is the 3rd time we’ve seen it in London, plus I think 2 in New York, 2 in Sydney, 1 in Melbourne…maybe more that I’m forgetting. We’ve seen it a lot – and it had changed almost every time. This time, they’ve taken out on of the racist jokes, which didn’t add much anyway, and they’ve changed a character’s “texting device” from a typewriter (that’s funny) to an iPad (that’s less funny) – but it does fit in with some of the newly inserted jokes about Facebook and its disinformation being the source of many of their troubles. It’s still just as entertaining when we first saw it 10 years ago, still laughed just as much, and for those who know the show, I think every time we’ve seen it the ‘Elder McKinley’ character gets better and better, and today’s had to be the best. Brilliant show as always, glad we were able to snag some tickets just the other day.

Straight after that it was back to the hotel, pick up the laundry (ah, clean clothes, so lovely!) and head straight out again for an evening appointment. For dinner we went to Baba Ganouj, the same place we had breakfast the other day. They really didn’t disappoint – not only were they really fast, the food was delicious, a delicious chicken kebab and an amazing cup of apple mint lemonade – it might sound a bit strange, and look a lot like pond water, but the taste was excellent, sweet and zingy, delicious.

Our evening appointment was us pretending to be all cultured and stuff – heading to the Royal Albert Hall for a night listening to the London Concert Orchestra. OK so it wasn’t all that fancy, the show was called ‘Williams vs Zimmerman’ – the orchestra played bits of the soundtrack from a number of John Willians films (ie Star Wars, ET, Jurassic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark), and some Hans Zimmer films (Inception, Man of Steel, Da Vinci Code). The conductor was Anthony Inglis, doing his best to be the hip grandad showing that orchestra can be coooool, kids, but possibly convincing none of us very much at all. But he was engaging and endearing enough to have us all on his side.

But let’s tale a minute to talk about the Royal Albert Hall. I knew it was pretty, but man, to be sitting inside it and looking around, it’s a magnificent place – layers of chairs, layers of booths, it’s old-world charm shining through still with its practical modern additions of flashing lights and laser beams and smoke machines (and plastic discs to reflect the sound properly off the roof). It’s just beautiful, but no doubt I’ll talk about more in a few days because we’ll be returning.

The concert was good – I think by the second half I was more tuned in than I was for the first half, where I was more “I’m just in a (very pretty) big room listening to some music”, but after intermission I felt much more engaged and connected to it all. The orchestra played some extremely complex pieces perfectly (well, as far as I could tell, what would I know), they did a great job and it all sounded marvellous. And they saved Start Wars right for the end – an interesting choice, it was the music from the end of the first (ie episode 4) movie, that then plays all the way through the end credits when you’re usually too busy walking out of the cinema to pay attention. It was a great choice as it incorporated so much of the soundtrack into its 5-minute-or-so length. A beautiful way to finish. At the start of the concert, the conductor stated very clearly at the start that “although we called it Williams vs Zimmer, it is not a competition”. Well it’s just my opinion, but, in this non-competition the winner for me was John Williams, hands down.

After that it was just a walk back to the hotel, which made things easy. Now I’m ready to hit publish, and not mention anything about loud beeping noises lest I accidentally summon them in the middle of the night again.