A Short Break in London

It's half term this week, and my wife fancied a bit of a break so she took the week off to look after our daughter. One of the things she said she fancied doing was to go up to London. So that's what we decided to do.

Hotel

We only wanted 2 days in London, so we decided to book one night in an hotel. Our credit card has a points scheme, which allows us to book flights, hotels, etc., so we took a look what our points would give us. We wanted something central, and ended up booking one night in the very new Park Plaza Westminster Bridge. After making the booking, my daughter suggested we go up the night before (after work for me). So I called back to try to book an extra night. We didn't have enough points for that, but we could pay cash. I won't say how much they wanted (it was a lot). When I phoned the hotel, they wanted a lot too, but less than the bank were asking for. We decided to forego the extra night.

Lesson: Reward schemes are not always cheaper.

The hotel was wonderful. We had a large room which had a sleeping area, a bathroom (obviously), and a lounge area. It even had a fridge and microwave oven. It was all very modern and stylish. I liked it a lot. The reception staff were very friendly. The porters and concierge staff were fantastic - extremely helpful and friendly. Breakfast let it down though. The full English breakfast was in fact a buffet. It cost about £25 each in addition to the high room rate. It was greasy and over-cooked. It was very tasty but looked awful - not what I'd expect from a hotel of this quality. They really should be ashamed of this, especially as everything else exceeded my expectations. I would definitely stay there again if I had enough points. Next time though I'd skip breakfast, and go to McDonald's instead :-)

Wicked

This was excellent, though not as good (in my opinion) as The Lion King. It was a great spin on the original story (The Wizard of Oz). The music was great, the singing was great, and the acting was great.

Abercrombie and Fitch

My daughter wanted to go to the Abercrombie and Fitch shop in Burlington Gardens. So we went there. We queued for about 20 minutes to get in. Once inside, it soon became apparent that the average age of the customers was 12. This was probably because it was half term.

Suggestion: Have a creche during school holidays so that the kids have somewhere to leave their parents.

Another suggestion: Hand out torches to help customers read the labels. Or turn the lights on.

We spent about 40 minutes looking around. My daughter picked out a hoodie and a t-shirt that she liked. We then queued up to pay. And we queued. And we queued. And we queued. We must have queued for about an hour, all around the shop. The till operators were more interested in chatting, dancing and having a laugh than serving customers. The only effort I could see being made by any of the staff in reducing queue size was one girl asking me to move up a couple of centimeters. Get a grip A&F, me not moving far enough was not the problem. The problem was more to do with your lazy/inept till operators and only having 4 tills serving hundreds of customers. Fix that, you plonkers.

Yet another suggestion: Employ grown-ups, not children, to operate your tills.

Benares

Benares is Atul Kochar's Michellin-starred restaurant in Berkley Square. We had a reservation for 1 pm  and only just got there in time - no thanks to Abercrombie and Fich's useless till operators.

The food, as expected, was wonderful. I had the soft-shelled crab starter. Marvelous.

The Natural History Museum

We queued for about an hour to get in, and queued for another 20 minutes to get in to see the dinosaurs. We didn't have to queue for anything else. I could quite happily spend hours in this place. Unfortunately my feet couldn't - I had what my wife refers to as "museum feet". I can't solely (geddit?) blame the Natural History Museum for this though - it was all of the walking required when you visit London. So after a coffee and a (slightly stale) carrot cake we headed for home via tube, train and car. It was rush hour, so the tube was busy. Very busy. I've never experienced the tube so full. I couldn't believe people's determination to squeeze into an already jam-packed compartment. They're either mad or stupid. Probably both.

In Summary

I love London, but have no desire to live there nor to work there. My advice would be to visit if you get the opportunity, but stay away during school holidays (the queues are horrendous) and when it's raining (because you'll get wet and taxi drivers rip you off).