the hope and sirloin

best lunch ever today at the hope and sirloin, near smithfield. roastbeef sandwich with horseradish. G had pork and crackling. both were delicious. washed down with a couple of half pints of a local brew called reservoir dogs.

interesting day - started with a paul rhodes' bakery breakfast - GREAT food - average coffee, tho by no means the worst coffee we've ever drunk.

jumped on an off-peak service into town and went to st martin in the fields' ticket office in the cypt to book our tickets for the tuesday concert. tomorrow will be extremely cultural...

popped into the national portrait gallery and saw some very cool stuff. wish you were here to enjoy it too.

then off for a spot of geocaching. have succesfully off-loaded all our trackables now, so that's good. it also led us to the london wall (very old, very crumbled) and the aforementioned lunch.

then for some shops. this was frankly the low point of the day - you know - they're just shops.

we regathered ourselves at a pret a manger for a snack, lemon cake, where geoff - to be on the safe side - ordered earl grey tea rather than coffee. my flat white was average and ok - his tea came with milk! oops.

we decided to go back to have another look at parliament and the abbey, both of which we saw briefly yesterday on the fat tire tour. we arrived at the abbey to discover that it was (a) closed to tourists after 3.30pm and also about 12 quid each! and (b) that if we wanted to pray we could wander on in.

a surly man at the gate wanted to know our business - i said Prayer very firmly - and we proceeded. turns out he was almost right - we were in time for evensong, so stuck around and listened to the choir boys. we were in the cheap seats so never actually saw any of the boys, but they sang very nicely indeed. got told off by the verger at the end of the service when we tried to hang around in poets' corner, but mostly stayed out of trouble. there was this crazy woman in front of us (possibly american) who every now and then tried to join in with the choir - an octave lower and not well at all - but other than that it was fine. the first lesson was all about joseph and what a prig he was etc etc and therefore how to avoid envy. altogether very uplifting (!)

sorry about that Dave. Also, they said special prayers for the anglican church in japan - turned out there was a large party of japanese anglicans in attendance - they were not in the cheap seats, but sitting around the choir stalls, so no doubt they saw many choir boys (as opposed to none).

Dave, if Michael loves singing I have an address - perhaps you could enquire before his voice breaks... and he too could be an abbey chorister?

after that we popped over the road for a restorative drink - mine was called lemony cricket and we evesdropped on some young Labour advisers or wannabes - talking about education and various other things. god, democracy should not be left to 23 year old policy wannabes! we came back to Greenwich after that - very tired, but all set to find a nice dinner. presently in our local - the mitre - having a wee drink and a read of the guardian. also this pub has free wifi, unlike our hotel (which is otherwise great).

hope you all had a good long weekend and are working hard. tomorrow, shakespeare's globe... we are toying with travelling there by river ferry... huzzah!