I spent 5 of the best years of my life living in London and since I left for the sunny Isle of Wight I have been on countless mini breaks back there with my family. It’s impossible to tire of London as it is such a diverse and amazing place. However, over time you start to learn that there are certain inevitable things that will make up your time there. Here is a list of 5 of them….



1. The London Eye – While it’s pouring down

Ah, the UK’s most popular attraction and Europe’s tallest Ferris Wheel. You’ve coughed up the wrong side of a hundred quid to get your timed tickets well in advance, your alarm goes off and you look forward to experiencing the full glory of London from a majestic height. Your camera’s battery is fully charged and the kids are excited. You jump out of bed and go to relieve yourself of the 3 overpriced mini cans of Stella you drank from the mini bar while you were in bed last night (you are on holiday after all). Your whistling away merrily when you suddenly without thought, your eyes take a quick flick glance out the window. Pissing down would be an understatement, visibility is pushing negative numbers and it takes a whiles for your eyes to get used to such deep shades of grey. You’re experiencing British Summertime in it’s full glory.

But in true British attitude, you stay positive. “Don’t worry everyone, it’ll definitely brighten up by the time we get there”. An hour later your stood in a queue and the weather earlier now in hindsight seemed quite pleasant. The 99p plastic macs you’ve kindly bought for the family quite can’t contend with the high constant throughput of water pounding on you in bucketfuls. The bottom of your trousers are sopping, the kids are screaming, the missus irrationally blames you, but suddenly you’re in the pod and about to ascend. It will be alright now, that high up the weather will be better and everyone will be loving the the experience.

Except for the fact, you can’t see shit. You think maybe you can see a blurry shape of what could possibly be the Houses of Parliament but you can’t be sure. You’re sharing the pod with 4 other random people you don’t know trying to make lame jokes about the weather, but nobody’s in the mood. The kids have got their smartphones out playing some crappy game and have switched their brains off to the world. Everywhere you look is grey miserable nothingness. This goes on for 20 minutes or so. You try desperately to take photos to try and get some return on your hard earned money but it’s all in vain.

Finally you get back round to the bottom. Everyone is wet and miserable. No words are spoken but you’re getting the blame. You’ve actually seen less of London in the last 30 minutes than you did on the 5 minute, 100 foot underground ride it took you to get here.

2. The Great Burger Robbery

So you’ve been walking around all day. You’re cold and still a little bit damp from earlier. Then you spot it, the premium burger restaurant. You’re attracted to the warm looking lighting like a fly to neon. The restaurant is almost guaranteed to be named by taking any one of these words and following it with the word Burger: Gourmet, Perfect, Proper, Splendid, Ideal, Absolute etc.. It looks nice though. There is a bit of a wait (people love a burger) so you wait patiently.

Eventually you sit down and have look at the menu. Predictably there is a reasonable selection of the normal suspects (bacon, blue cheese, egg, blah). Straight away the kids are saying that want the Ultimate Extreme Belly Buster Burger. You know they won’t even get close to finishing it but you’re on holiday and meant to be enjoying yourself so it’s fine. Then you see the price. Your brain melts down a little bit. It takes a little while for you to get your breath back. You start telling yourself that if you’re paying what you’d normally pay for a a years supply of McDonalds for the family, it’s bound to be good. Your mind starts to quickly calculate if you will be able to pay the bill if you remortgage the house and sell some of non necessary items you own, like the TV. You think it just might be possible and after all, you don’t want to spoil the party, so you keep quiet. Just as you start to calm down you notice that the bastards have the unbelievable audacity to not even give you chips with the burger. They are counted as a ‘side order’ and are the same price as what a small meal would normally costs each.

It’s ok, this is going to be the mother of all burgers, a moment to remember for life. You’ve seen others coming out. Forget plates, these are served on friggin chopping board for God’s sake! That’s got to be a good sign and surely bodes well for the quality of the burger.

Finally it arrives. It doesn’t look bad but you’re not totally blown away, but you have been well informed that brioche buns are very sophisticated. You take your first bite. You’re taste buds are completely consumed by the overriding fact that the (literally) bloody thing is not even close to being cooked. You take a look and all you can see is a pink mushy lump soaking blood into your posh bun. The missus looks at you with a certain distain and tells you that is the way burgers are meant to be cooked. The kids having taken 2 bites each and say they are full, but still they start to look at the dessert menu with wide eyes. You hold back the tears and force feed yourself the raw meat patty like you’ve suddenly appeared starring in the middle of a Saw movie. You pay the bill and leave broke, still hungry and add the whole experience to your ever growing list of ‘stupid things’, whilst knowing in a few months you’ll probably be back and doing exactly the same thing.

3. The wonder of the West End

You’ve got a few hundred quid saved up. You don’t know what to spend it on, you are thinking maybe a nice all inclusive sunny week in the Canary islands would do it. Maybe a nice new smartphone? You could actually really do with a stylish new suit. Oh no, the missus has other ideas. She has decided that it would be a great idea for you all to go and see a musical. Everyone loves a bloody musical don’t they? You spend the next hour or two looking for tickets on your phone that magically double in price when you go to checkout. You finally get some seats on the far left upper circle and only 2 of them are ‘restricted’ (directly behind a pillar). They are an absolute bargain and only cost the same as a return flight to Madrid each.

You roll up half an hour before the show. The kids want a program, apparently they are only a tenner, you are made of money after all! You queue up for 20 minutes for your only saving grace, a pint of weak larger at quadruple it’s regular price and then you make your way to the ‘auditorium’. Then you see your empty seats about 20 seated people down the row. You do the ‘sorry’, ‘sorry’, ‘thank you’, ‘sorry!’ walk of shame as everybody stands up to let you through forcing a smile. As soon as you sit down you daughter thinks it’s an ideal time to say she needs a wee. You repeat the ‘sorry’, ‘thanks’, ‘sorry about this’ journey again back the other way, already cringing from the fact you will have to repeat it again in 2 minutes when you come back.

Finally you’re all settled and then it begins, the onslaught of random sentences half sang / half spoken. It’a all very similar to the jazzy-hand style screeching you were forced to listen to during your high school drama club’s yearly production. Everyone’s jumping around on stage like they are being constantly electrocuted up the arse. The lead part makes some awful scripted joke or supposedly funny gesture towards the audience. In normal life you wouldn’t crack the smallest of smiles, but this is the theatre darling, you have to laugh as loud as you can to make sure everybody knows you understood the joke. The balding middle age business man behind you forces such a loud fake belly laugh it nearly blows your head straight off. This repeats for the next 40 minutes. All you can think about now is the interval. If you move your arse quickly enough you might just get to bar fast enough to fit two quick pints in before you’re forced to go and encourage the thespian to carry on doing their thing. Of course this doesn’t happen, once you get towards the bar the queue is as far back as the stairs. You luckily get a quick pint in and get half way through it when the bloody bell goes off.

During the second half, something very strange happens. Time stops, completely. The cast have now all started wailing their own parts in the mandatory montage of songs that have already been sang an hour ago. You’re looking at your watch but it hasn’t moved for at least 30 minutes. The wife and kids are having a great time wailing along to a song that you already know is going to be played on repeat on your car stereo for the next two years. Then the desperation for a wee starts. It gets strong really quickly, but there is no way you are making the line of people stand up again. You look at your watch, it still hasn’t moved. Someone dressed up as a cat is in the spotlight on stage having some kind of emotional breakdown about some memories of being a kitten or something. Then just when you think you can’t take it anymore it finishes. Everyone claps like it’s going out of fashion. They’re standing up and cheering like we’ve just won the war. This only goes to encourage the cast to walk on and off the stage half a dozen times. You get outside and it’s like you’re tasting your first moment of freedom for 20 years. You jump on the tube and normality is almost restored. Then the kids start wailing out the songs on repeat mode, but in comparison it’s an easy ride.

4. Museum Hell

There are a couple of exceptions to this (The Science Museum being one), but most museums in London are bloody hard work. I don’t know if it’s just me, but queuing for 45 minutes to see a bit of old bone just doesn’t float my boat. I love a museum where you can push buttons and pull levers and stuff happens (says something about my mental age), but 80% of museums are not like that. Most of the time you are walking around a big dark corridor looking through the glass at a bit small fragment of tile. For the first twenty minutes you feel all cultural and read the long winded descriptions about this incredible piece of porcelain. You carry on for a while and feel all smug that you now know that the crappy looking vase you are now looking at was actually made by a one handed peasant somewhere between 1100 and 1200 AD. This is useful information, it’s going to come up in a pub quiz one day and this will be your chance to shine. But who are you kidding, you can’t keep this up. By the time you get to generic looking statue number two, which to be honest could just as well have been bought from the B&Q garden centre last week for all you know, your brain has shutdown. It’s done this because it really doesn’t care about anything you are looking at and is trying to conserve energy. The kids brains shutdown about 30 minutes ago and are screaming that they want to go to the park. The missus however, who is by no doubt more intelligent and cultural than you will ever be, is transfixed on a 18 paragraph description about a tatty bit of tapestry she has come across. You tell her you want to go, by she gives you the look, and you know you are going to be here for at least another hour.

The key here is to take the kids off to the cafe. The museum cafes have got you well and truly by the short and curlies though. They know you’re bored before you do and they know you will spend anything to break the monotony. It is this fact that allows them to charge 3 times the normal price for a coffee and the GDP of a small country for a ‘Kids Lunchbox’ which consists of half a sandwich, a packet of Hula Hoops and a week old apple.

You get your coffee, the kids are temporarily happy, then the wife comes along and tells you that you’re all going to ‘Floor 5 – Textiles through the ages’ next. Your heart takes a steep downward leap, you didn’t even know there were 5 floors. You try your hardest, but it’s hard to find a textile that excites you. Sure, the chequered satin from the 60’s has a little bit more something about it than the plain velvet textile of the early 90’s, but when this is the most exciting thing that is happening, you know you have problems.

The kids are going bloody mental now. They are sprinting up and down the hallways like it’s a running track. You have no energy left to control them, so you simply pretend they are not your kids, and give the ‘look at those awful brats, where are their parents?’ look to passers by.

You start fantasising about the life you had pre-museum. Outside in the open air with no pressure to learn useless information. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, your dream becomes reality, you step outside. Then the wife tells you that you’re going to the V&A museum after lunch. You see an oncoming bus and have to make a the most important decision of your life.

5. The Hotel Breakfast

Ok, this one isn’t strictly confined to breaks in London, you could be on any trip, but it is always the case for our trips to London so it’s a worthy contender to be on this list.

When I was a young lad, generally the hotel breakfast consisted of a small bowl of cereal then maybe a couple of sausages and bacon to follow. Those days are long gone. Now the U.K has gone all U.S.A on us. Nowadays it’s the bigger the better.

The hotel breakfast has become a very significant part of or London trips and the wife and I now under the illusion we are some kind of petit dejeuner connesieurs of the highest order.

If you are staying in anything but the smallest chain of hotels, you are pretty much guaranteed to be offered the now renowned ‘buffet’ style breakfast. This instantly means that breakfast goes from a relaxed enjoyable experience to one of the biggest challenges of your life.

First of all my wife and I take it in turns to make the preliminary inspection of the goods on offer. This is a very serious procedure. All items are noted and mentally a score is given to the quality of each item. Once this has been completed we sit back down at the table to exchange notes, something along the lines of: “Well they have Hash Browns which is a definite plus but they look slightly underdone”, “The yoghurt looks of a good calibre but the flavor selection is somewhat lacking”, “The mushrooms are not the shade of grey I would really be looking for”. This goes on for a while over the first cup of coffee then there is a little time of silence to reflect about the storm ahead.

And then it begins, the gastronomical apocalypse has started. It always starts for me with a large bowl made up of every cereal I can find. In goes a double twist on the stupid dispenser of highly sweetened granola, a twist of sugar puffs and then a nice double twist of cocoa pops and maybe a few Frosties as a topping. I sit down and finish it off with relative ease. At this point my hunger has been satisfied and I could just walk away a happy man, albeit with a slightly raised sugar level. But no, we’ve paid for unlimited breakfast and we ain’t stopping for man nor beast.

We move on to the smorgasbord of hot items. This is where the real challenge begins. At minimum I fill the plate with 2 sausages, a few rashers of bacon, a couple of eggs, at least 3 hash browns, black pudding (if it’s there, I seem to be the only person who likes it), beans, toast and mushrooms. My wife and daughter do the same albeit on a smaller scale. We then sit down, there is no talking, this is serious business. We start slowly but surely to eat.

By the end our stomachs are about to burst, we all feel ill and just want to lay down for eternity. But it’s not over yet, not by a long shot. There are still the fruit, yoghurts, cold meats and the waffle machine I spotted earlier to tackle. Any enjoyment in eating disappeared a long time ago, but there is a point to prove. It’s not a point that can be described in words, but we all know what it is without the need to communicate it. We give each other the knowing nod and carry on.

An hour later it’s over. We have paid a high price, but we have won. As we slowly waddle back to our room, no words are spoken yet there is a silent sense of camaraderie that can only be gained when you have experienced something painful as a group and somehow come out the other side.

We collapse on bed and try to breathe without moving to limit the discomfort. Slowly as time passes on our movement slowly regains life. We leave the hotel for the day all vowing never to eat again, until a few hours later we see a lovely looking burger restaurant…..