A few days ago, we went to London, with Tilly’s friend Eleanor. We all got one of the early trains, and played Hangman on it while it was driven away. I looked around for a bit before I set down my words, and when I saw a purple bench, I quickly scribbled down the letter dashes for that before I forgot it! They were actually quite good words since nobody got them for ages.
When the train pulled up at London, past all the tunnels and tracks, we got off and went straight for the tube. That went right to the centre of the great capital, and there were a load of parks there we went and played in and had lunch in, too.
After loads of long, long walks, we went to a museum.
There they had ROOMS FILLED WITH CLOCKS! According to my obsession with them, it was absolutely amazing! Each and every clock in those rooms HAD to be looked at for at least five minutes! But obviously, Mummy, Tilly, Eleanor and William were all a bit confused and were sort of wondering around aimlessly, and we were all starving, so eventually Mummy tried to drag me away from those precious, tick-tock-dong-dong-dong-cuckoo!-cuckoo!-tick-tick-tocking rooms! Another good thing about it was that we entered at exactly 11:59, so they all began to go off! ‘Twas amazing!
We also went to Trafalgar Square, where we went to the National Gallery. Outside the gallery there was a long line of random people, all holding some big red umbrellas with white letters on them.
When we got into the gallery, we were going to go to the balcony to see, perhaps, if we could see the umbrellas, but we decided to look at all the paintings first.
We found some really interesting ones – one being the Arnolfini Portrait, which we had studied at home. It’s a brilliant picture of an old-fashioned couple holding hands, with a mirror at the back of the room which displays the backs of the couple and two people at the doorway, one which may be the artist himself. The chandelier above the couple has only one candle lit, and that’s the one above the man. Some people think that the wife is dead, since there is no candle lit, and she is the spirit of the picture.
We also went for a walk through Hyde Park up to Buckingham Palace. The flag on the roof was tied tightly down to the handle, so the Queen wasn’t in that day. We sat on the walls and took some pictures, and then we continued through those lovely fields until we found Apsley House. There we had an audio guide with headphones, and I did the ‘Family’ one, which is super fun. I learnt all about how the Duke of Wellington, Arthur, had lived there, and there were? statues and pictures of the great fighter Napoleon, because Arthur couldn’t help liking his fighting techinques! Did you know that, instead of it being ‘Apsley House’ as an address, it really was ‘No. 1 London’? Isn’t that amazing?
At the end of Hyde Park, there’s an amazing playground called the Princess Diana Memorial Playground. It’s HUGE! It’s got a brilliant pirate ship and about ten different rooms to it, all got to by long bamboo tunnels with little rooms coming off each one, and at least two tunnels in separate direction in each room. It was absolutely awesome! There were sandy rooms, too, and water ones, so we all took off our shoes and socks and splash! splash! dig! dig! It was truly fun.
We were going to go to Masala Zone, a brilliant resturant only ten minutes away, but when we said clearly, “A table for five, please,” the man said, “You’ll ‘ave to wait about thir’y minutes for tha’, I’m afraid,” so we all decided to go to Waitrose, which was just across the road. We thought perhaps to get the tube somewhere, but halfway through Mummy said it was too late, so we got off at the next stop and jumped onto the train with our tickets in our hands. When we got home it was 10 o’clock already! We dropped off Eleanor and immediately fell alseep…