London, June 2011. After stepping off the train from York into the swirl of Kings Cross station and manoeuvering my too-heavy bags out the door to the street, I came to a decision.
Though I had half-made plans to visit the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum or the Tate Modern - to get a bit of much-needed culture into me, you understand - there was, as I blinked in the surprisingly warm sun on that Friday afternoon, only one option that made any sense to me: to play tourist.
This may seem, well, a damned sort of obvious thing to do. I was, after all, exactly that: a tourist. But what I meant was this: instead of seeking out the more cultivated bits of London, I decided I would set about seeing and hearing as many of the cliched sights and sounds of the city as I could in the two-and-a-bit days I had.
First it was the Houses of Parliament, then the London Eye (cancelled; there was no way I was joining a queue that size), Downing St, Whitehall, Westminster Abbey (cancelled; ditto), the Mall, Buckingham Palace, a hot dog in St James' Park, a Soho pub crawl, jumping up and down in a Soho punk club, the Tower, fish and chips and a couple of cold ones on the South Bank, evensong at St Pauls, a ferry to Greenwich ... I actually went a bit mad, though this might have because it was 27C most of the time.
Of course if there is any city in the world in which one should play absolute tourist, London is it. And this is not just because there are plenty of those cliched sights and sounds.
