A city of character

London is fresh on all our minds today after we’ve been forced to follow the recent royal wedding so closely. For two weeks it has been featured on every television channel, even the thirty devoted exclusively to food. It has made the cover of most magazines. Much discussion has taken place about Kate’s wedding dress and its designer Sarah Burton – including where she lives, works and takes her dog for a walk. (Frankly I was disappointed that, after all that build-up, Kate turned up in something white). The actual event was telecast for seven hours non-stop and reported in detail in local newspapers and the International Herald Tribune... on the front page of course.

But after this heady media immersion, it is useful to remind ourselves that, apart from the royal family, there are other interesting aspects about London, many of which I discovered on a recent trip.

On my first day – a beautiful morning with clear skies and a crisp breeze – I asked the hotel concierge to recommend a running route. Based on my previous experience, I expected to be pointed to a nearby park with shady trees, velvet lawns and paths cushioned with fallen leaves. Or perhaps she would suggest a quaint path along the majestic Thames, with the gently flowing river on one side and stately buildings on the other.

“There’s a cemetery nearby, Sir,” she said.

I clarified that I had nothing more morbid than running in mind but she insisted. So I was soon running on a path crisscrossing the cemetery, which was filled with trees, lawns, benches and, of course, hundreds of graves. I passed other joggers, pedestrians using the cemetery as a short-cut, tourist with cameras, couples on romantic walks, two women walking their dog and an elderly group doing gentle exercises on the lawn. Once past my bewilderment, I enjoyed the run: the weather was cool, the morning quiet, the trees restful to the eye, and if there were tombstones where flowers should be, so what?

Another distinctive feature of London is the traditional full English breakfast, a meal that includes fried bacon, fried eggs, fried mushrooms, fried bread, fried sausages and tea. If they could find a way to fry the tea, they would. Today’s Londoner – more sedentary than his grandfather – only indulges in the traditional breakfast on weekends at the pub (then totters home to spend the day in bed, moaning softly).

Being vegetarian, I gladly gave this extravaganza a miss. Instead, displaying multi-tasking skills that would make a teenager proud, I munched a sandwich while traveling by tube, reading the London underground map and admiring it, all at the same time. The London underground is a fascinating myriad of lines connecting hundreds of stations (there’s always one within walking distance) with exotic-sounding services like the Hammersmith and City Line. Unfortunately the underground lives up to its name, with many stations deep under the earth and not equipped with elevators; so I had to often descend and painfully ascend hundreds of stairs.

But this was much better than driving… on the wallet, if not the knees. To encourage people to use public transport and to line its coffers, the government introduced a congestion charge a few years ago. It was modeled on Singapore but the British seem to have doubled the rate and then multiplied it by four. Today you pay £10 to enter Central London (and anywhere between £120 and £300 for a full day’s parking).

One evening I watched Agatha Christie’s play, The Mouse Trap, I enjoyed it but am not sure which was the bigger surprise – the ending or the fact that this play has been running continuously in the West End theatre since 1952, clocking up more than 24,000 performances.

On my return, I took the swift Heathrow Express from Paddington. I was whisked to the airport in fifteen minutes in a sleek, modern carriage, only to alight at an airport that looked old and disheveled, an appearance heightened by desultory construction going on in patches and weary travellers wandering about looking lost or tired or both. I departed London with the final thought that, in a city with buildings like Westminster Abby, Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London, the run-down Heathrow Airport is a curious anomaly.