Tag Archives: Life in the UK

Throwing Some Shapes..

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Ten sleeps to go until Christmas Day…

…and today I was off for a bit of festive lunching at The Chop House at Butlers Wharf. The Chop House is nestled just under the south eastern ramparts of Tower Bridge and an easy 15 minute stroll from London Bridge tube station. Needless to say I left home in plenty of time for a little pre-lunch strolling – and you just never know when travel plans may go awry.

My ‘extra’ time quickly disappeared as I admired this relatively unknown – to me anyway – part of London. And I couldn’t help but whip out the smartphone and record its moody shape-shifting for posterity this post.

It all looked a bit un-auspicious when I first got there…


…but lovely little shops and cafes lined the cobbled laneways and taking a smart left turn led me to The Galleria…


…whose exit on to the river brought the City’s growing mix of modern shapes above the old sharply into focus.


Looking right, the White Tower of the Tower of London (left) and Tower Bridge beckoned despite the damp and dreary skies…


…while at my back, this strange tree-like shape took my fancy amidst the stark winter branches that surrounded it.


Sometimes a new position brings a whole new perspective and standing outside the More Riverside complex with The Shard looming in the background was an opportunity to see London’s urban face, washed shiny by the rain…


..while the controversial City Hall beckoned further along the river bank.


And no Thames-side meandering would be complete without the magnificent Tower Bridge. It didn’t seem to matter how many times I have seen it or how many photographs I’ve taken before, my hand moved automatically to my pocket to take just a few more… 



So it would seem that I’m not the only one throwing some shapes this festive season.

Only ten sleeps to go…

…you should be dancin’…yeah.

Brand Santa…

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There are 13 sleeps to go until Christmas Day (12 if you’ve just woken up Down Under)…


…and the Gidday HQ stash is looking good under the verdant boughs of my un-real – aka plastic – tree. 

Christmas is in full swing on this side of the planet with my first festive do under my belt and a super-busy week ahead as I do more of the necessary yuletide rounds – socialising, dancing and raising a glass or two (oh alright, five) to pay homage to this most wonderful time of the year.

And I’ve also been keeping my eye out for any clever Christmas chicanery to share.

This morning I was indulging in a quick browse through my Facebook feed before the tube went underground when I found this…

Source: http://www.quietroom.co.uk

For those of you who don’t know, haven’t guessed, have never looked up my LinkedIn profile or simply don’t care, I work in Marketing. 

(Please note, this makes me a Marketer, not a Marketeer. I didn’t go off to some club, wave my arms around and wear black plastic ears to get myself a career.)

But I digress.

The folk at Quietroom have put together this brilliant Santa ‘brand book’, a fabulous tribute to the fat man in all his glory and a complete p*sstake of marketers everywhere. I chuckled at the brand promise, laughed at the brand house and guffawed at the brand assets being ‘geographilised’…and then thought about all the brand books I’ve worked with over the years.

Well, I guess there’s nothing like a little irreverent festive fun to put things in perspective.

13 sleeps to go peeps..time to Snap It Clap It Wrap It.

Let The Festivities Commence…

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Today is December 1st and that can mean only one thing:

It’s been a hive of festive activity at Gidday HQ today. First order of business was the construction of the Mum’s traditional seasonal supplement, the advent calendar…


It took me a while to find today’s window, hidden as it was in a back street…


Then there was a spot of present wrapping to make sure I could get some Seattle-bound goodies into tomorrow’s post (Seattle-A, look out for Santa-Kym’s delivery very soon.)

Then it was time for that favourite of all my favourite Christmas things – decorating the tree.

I missed out on this last year between lounging about in Langkawi and meandering around Melbourne – and since Christmas 2011 I’ve travelled to Krakow and Amsterdam (among many other places) and have added a few more objets d’Christmas to my horde. 

Needless to say I spent a happy couple of hours laying out all of my carefully wrapped ornaments and awarding them their leafy homes for the next month…


And last but by no means least, Alfie Bear has a new Christmas hat…


So it’s all systems go here at Gidday HQ.

Let the festivities commence!

Composers, Canalboats And Christmas Cheer…

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What with lots of changes, challenges and general excitement over the last few months I’ve been a little lax in my pottering about London (note I do not include my recent tourist-ing with Lil Chicky in this – that was by no stretch ‘pottering’) and today it was a combination of music and markets that had my full attention. Having been in Chicago for work this week (and slept the morning away yesterday ‘in recovery’), today saw me up, about and out the door for a little culture and some festive cheer. 

First stop (well after the tube ride and the large soy cappuccino purchase at Caffe Nero) was Kings Place for Bach Unwrapped, a one hour concert featuring the work of JS Bach, his protege JG Goldberg, and his son, CPE Bach. For those of you in the know about these things, today’s Trio Sonatas programme consisted of:

Trio in G for flute and violin
Trio in C for two violins (collaboration with Goldberg)
Trio in D Minor for two violins (collaboration with his son)
Trio Sonata from Musical Offering

(For those of you who know nothing about these things, the violin, cello and harpsichord were joined by another violin for the second and third pieces and a flute for the first and the fourth.)

Apparently the last piece, Musical Offering was borne of the composer’s meeting with Frederick The Great in 1747 – the King challenged Bach to improvise over a theme he had written and while Bach rose to the immediate challenge, on returning home he composed Musical Offering and despatched it to King Frederick. The programme note claimed that Musical Offering has been dazzling musicians with its brilliance ever since.

While I don’t know very much about classical music, I find it incredibly moving and very easy to lose myself in the ebb and flow of the music so after an enjoyable hour, I wandered out and headed back to Kings Cross Station in a leisurely snap-happy stroll. 

Despite my having been there several times, I had never actually walked out the back of Kings Place before today – lo and behold there’s a rather lovely deck which overlooks Regent’s Canal…


…and the stroll back to the station along the canal was quite pretty too.



The area around Kings Cross and St Pancras Stations has been undergoing a major redevelopment since 2008 and in the midst of the construction site, there’s quite a pleasant walkway – dotted with titbits about the area’s history – which connects the stations to Regent’s Canal. This is the view coming back from the canal, the spire of the Grade I listed St Pancras International station building standing tall above the ‘debris’.

The forecourt between Kings Cross and St Pancras stations.

The second half of my Sunday foray was spent wandering along the Southbank Christmas Market. There is something deliciously festive about this market. The decorated stalls stretched along the riverside path from The London Eye to the National Theatre with stallholders plugging their wares (hand made gifts and eclectic arts and crafts feature heavily), tempting passersby with a fresh waffle, a little glühwein or perhaps some kind of German sausage concoction.

Nearly there – this glimpse of Big Ben framed by the railway bridge caught my eye from Concert Hall Walk on the way to Southbank.
This ‘urban’ paint job decorated the entrance at the back of Royal Festival Hall. 
Traditional festive cheer above one stall…
…faced off against Scrooge on another.
German sausage concoction? Enough said…

The twinkling lights, the smell of roasted chestnuts…I just love it. Even the nip in the air as I snuggled deeper into my coat, hat and scarf was a reminder of the merriment to come…in just 31 sleeps.

Needless to say I’ve started my Christmas shopping…

Simply The ‘Est’

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Well she’s here.

Lil Chicky has been ensconced at Gidday HQ since Tuesday and I’ve been out and about rather a lot showing her the sights and making the most of what’s on offer thus the lack of tap-tap-tapping.

I’ll share more fun stories and gory details later but in the meantime, I thought I’d give my lovely Gidday-ers a whirlwind tour of our exploits so far.

Are you ready?

We’ve been to…

…the highest…

The highest steeple in England at Salisbury Cathedral

…the tallest…

Europe’s new tallest skyscraper The Shard overlooks the Thames and City Hall (the weird curved building front left)

…the oldest…

5,000 years of history at Stonehenge
…the swankiest…

 Save your pennies for one of the most expensive apartments available in Knightsbridge

…the greenest…

Beautiful Green Park (that bright shiny object is the sun)

…the royal-est…

 The gates at Buckingham Palace

…and the longest…

The world’s longest running play, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap currently at St Martin’s Theatre

…as well as celebrating a certain special birthday with a glass of vino or two.

Happy birthday to Lil Chicky…40 is definitely the new 30!

 

Day 6 looms ahead of us. We are off into town again today so who knows what adventures, stories and photos from Chicky Tours Unlimited will make tonight’s Gidday Wine Review.

You’ll just have to wait and see…

Single Figures…

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We are down to single figures peeps.

In just 9 sleeps, my little sister (aka Lil Chicky) will step off a very long flight from Down Under and into Old London Town (well Heathrow Airport anyway).

It will be her first ever trip here – hopefully not the last.  And I am ridiculously excited.

It’s getting difficult to think about anything else at the moment. I try to remember what my first London Loves were and I find myself wondering what are sorts of things she would like to do and see. Are they the same things that struck me when I first travelled here in 2000? The history, the theatre, the eclectic cultural mix, the architecture? Or is it something else? Perhaps a little high tea or some high kicks at a show? Or shall we take in the Eye, the Abbey, the Shard, the Wall or even the Cock in the Square.

The National Gallery and St Martin in the Fields overlook Trafalgar Square and the latest installation on The Fourth Plinth

The mind boggles.

Lately I have found myself in the midst of my day when I am struck by something I want to show her or share. Like on Friday night when I left the office (my ‘new’ one – our Head Office – where I am now based) and saw this…

…or the view from Waterloo Bridge at night which, after almost 10 years here, still makes me catch my breath and say to myself ‘I really did it. I live here. This is my home.’


So much to do and so little time.

And only 9 sleeps to go.

That’s exciting.

In Shardlake’s Shoes…

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It’s Sunday again (where does the time go?) and I’ve been out and about today enjoying the lovely Autumn weather and indulging my passion for history and books in one fell swoop.

The City of London proved itself an excellent stage for Shardlake’s City, a walking tour based on the novels of C.J. Sansom and his protagonist, Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer living in Tudor London. Blue Badge guide Paula met us this morning at the glorious Royal Courts of Justice and took us on a 2 hour odyssey back into 16th century London…


The Royal Courts of Justice, Fleet Street London

We visited Shardlake’s ‘home’ at 124 Chancery Lane, the Inns of Courts where he plied his trade, the public houses frequented by his able assistant Barak and a whole range of locations pertinent to the five novels in the Shardlake series so far. Here are just a few pics…

Shardlake’s offices were located at Lincoln’s Inn in Chancery Lane, just a short walk from his front door….

…but he also petitioned at Gray’s Inn and Clifford’s Inn. The Prudential building actually housed one of the ‘feeder’ inns for London’s legal profession.

The Old Mitre is representative of the back alley pubs where Barak, Shardlake’s assistant, would have visited.

Shardlake’s investigations took him all over the City of London, from Cromwell’s corridors to the seedier parts of the city…

Clockwise from top left: Smithfields Market, site of public executions in the 16th century; getting our bearings coming out of St Bartholomew’s; peering over the ‘back fence’ at St Bartholomew’s Monastery and Chapel

Clockwise from top left: St Bartholomew’s Hospital (with Henry VIII over the door), the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, the site of the infamous Newgate Prison (demolished in 1777) opposite the Old Bailey (right)


Near the end of the two hours, we approached one of our final stops on the tour, the Guildhall, to find that rather than a quiet square, the Pearly Kings and Queens Harvest Festival was in full swing…


As the tour drew to a close in Poultry (which ended at the site of…ahem…Grope C*nt Lane – did what it says on the tin really) it was time for a well-earned coffee and chinwag. The conversation started with giving our guide Paula a bit of a grilling about the whys and wherefores of being a guide before weaving through subjects like architecture, book clubs and history just to name a few. It was a very pleasant way to cap off our shared walk through Shardlake’s City together.

Finally, I headed for home, foot-sore and mind buzzing with all of the interesting tidbits that I’d learned about London over the course of the tour. As I sat on the tube going back to Finchley, I flicked through all of the photos I’d taken, reliving a fantastic three hours (including the post-tour coffee). And I marvelled at how a little girl from the other side of the world grew up to live in one of the most fascinating cities in the world.

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If you like the sound of this tour, check out crossingthecity.co.uk and find out when the next Shardlake City tour – or any of the other tours in Paula’s repertoire for that matter – is scheduled. You might just fall a little bit more in love with London yourself.


Kindred Spirits…

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Each evening as the 82 bus trundles north up Finchley Road and navigates the lights at Henly’s Corner I find myself cheered by the thought of just a few more stops before I’m off for the short walk home. Henly’s Corner can be a nightmare for the traffic if things go wrong but most nights, it’s a fairly seamless crossing to deliver passengers to the bus stop on the other side so my optimism is usually well-placed.

As you reach the other side of the North Circular and start up Regents Park Road, there’s a big green ‘space’ to the left. It seems an odd place to position a patch of nature, right next to the heaving flow of traffic. Even odder is the statue – a naked woman raising her arms to the sky, her sword in one uplifted hand. As the bus merges back into the traffic from the stop, her brazen profile stands stark against the urban ‘wallpaper’ behind her. A silent silhouette, triumphant and still, while I sit, usually oblivious, immersed in my post-workday literary feast. 

Image source: Wikipedia

But a few weeks ago, too tired to read, I spent the entire journey from West Hampstead gazing out of the window and as I saw her, arms uplifted, I wondered how she came to be there. What’s the story here, I wondered?

So out came my trusty HTC One and before long I had the answer.

The Naked Lady (real name La Délivrance) was purchased by Lord Rothermere (the family of The Daily Mail fame) in 1920 and gifted to the district of Finchley. Initially local officials, in need of a war memorial, planned to place the statue – created to celebrate the first battle of Marne which prevented the Germans from capturing Paris in 1914 – at the entrance to Victoria Park. But our well-heeled aristocrat put his foot down – the current location or not at all – and so the statue was unveiled in its current location by Prime Minister David Lloyd-George in 1927.

The Naked Lady is the creation of French sculptor Émile Oscar Guillaume and stands, a bronzed 16 feet tall, at the southern edge of Finchley.

A bronzed goddess hey?

I always knew I’d find kindred spirits in Fab Finchley.


ps…speaking of kindred spirits, there are only 19 sleeps to go until my very own sibling kindred spirit arrives…la deliverance indeed!

Going Downto(w)n…

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There has been a blogging hiatus here at Gidday HQ as life in general overtook…well everything over the last couple of weeks. Preparing our exhibition at an international industry fair last week has been a six month affair but the last couple of weeks have been all-consuming and short of tapping out my 3am lists of things to do here on Gidday – not very interesting reading – I’ve been a bit bereft of my usual ability to blog about the things that I have found fascinating, curious, annoying, inspiring and funny. It was like everything all got stuck in the pipe and I couldn’t find the wherewithal to squeeze them out.

So this weekend has been a time for making space, for letting my head empty and my body unravel from the work of the last six months and in the process, I’ve discovered a whole new addiction…

…Downton Abbey.

Highclere Castle, or as we know it, Downton Abbey.

I know many of you may be wondering how I have managed to come so late to this particular party in light of my predilection for the historical. Well, a few weeks ago I was out for dinner with friends and they were talking about the show, how great it was, and were quite surprised that I hadn’t succumbed. We left the pub agreeing that Season 1 would find myself to me the following day…and the rest, as they say, is history. Season 2 was done and dusted soon after.

With both a purposely empty Sunday – to recover from the last seven days away and enjoy an unimpeded re-aquaintance with my own bed – and the start of Season 4 screening tonight, I have spent this weekend watching Season 3. If any of you have watched a whole season of something in a compressed period of time, you might understand the emotional rollercoaster of watching a whole nine episodes in quick succession. There are A LOT of ups and downs in this season so I’m thinking that it was probably much less exhausting to allow a week in between viewings.

But be that as it may, I am completely hooked. So I’ll be joining the hordes of fans for tonight’s frolic through Fellowes‘ fictional take on upstairs and downstairs.

And just in case you were wondering (it’s been a little while so you may have forgotten), there are 23 sleeps to go until Lil Chicky arrives at Gidday HQ.

And I only have six working days left until I move into my new role at work. 

So much excitement, I can hardly stand it.

The Sh*t Bit…

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I saw someone post on Facebook this week that people who only have happy positive status updates were not being completely honest – that sometimes life is just a bit sh*t.

After an amazing couple of weeks where I got promoted, had a birthday and generally felt lucky, humbled and a bit like I was floating on air, I’ve come down to earth with a bit of a thud.

So in the interests of having a good moan balancing the scales, here it comes.

The sh*t bit.

It all started with a second rubbish night’s sleep in a row as my back grumbled and groaned through the early hours after a pretty ‘robust’ acupuncture/ massage/ cupping session on Saturday.

A bad night’s sleep is NEVER good…and also one of the many reasons I don’t have children.

Anyway I fronted up to the train station this morning to buy my weekly travel card only to have my debit card declined. Upon further investigation, it transpired that my card had actually been cancelled by the Fraud Team (FT) at my bank…last Thursday (today is Monday). While I’m all for taking steps to ensure that some bugger doesn’t empty my funds albeit meagre from my account, a notification (like a text message or phone call which said bank seems to use at will for a myriad of other occasions) would be nice. Let me tell you, I can think of a few other words FT could stand for.

Needless to say, I held my breath as I waited for the credit card from my ‘other’ bank to clear the funds for my ticket.

I arrived at the office, looking forward to a quiet moment with my coffee to ease into the busy day ahead. I opened my email to find that the person from our Russian office who was to join us for 6 months to cover a colleague‘s maternity leave from today was refused entry into the UK and shipped back to Moscow on a flight at 8.50 this morning. Oh crap crap crap!

Then mid morning I placed a call to my local medical centre to follow up a referral from an appointment 3 weeks ago. After having to explain several times that I wasn’t chasing the results but the referral and asking for the letter to be re-faxed (as I had been asked to do by the nurse), I was given a number to call to get a name so that the fax could be addressed to a specific person for me to follow up.

On the best of days, this convoluted sort of process tests me. Today…

…and to make matters worse the number I was given didn’t connect, so I had to ring back and explain everything again. Apparently I was going to get a call back this afternoon…

Finally I left the office. I had a physiotherapy appointment booked (for said grumpy back) so I got to the station in plenty of time…and managed to get on a train that didn’t stop at my station. The lovely train station lady at St Pancras did let me get back on a train going the other way 15 minutes later (instead of fining me for not having a ‘valid ticket for travel’) and I did get home in time for a quick change of clothes before my appointment so you could argue that things were starting to turn around.

But quite frankly it was a day I could have done without.

I know that there could have been a lot of other, much worse things to deal with than my litany of inconsequential irritations. But it just didn’t feel like I could catch a break. So I figure that tomorrow’s got to be a better day…

…right?