Nine days right at the end

Many years ago, when I was still in the early stages of this trip, every arrival in a new city came with a burst of renewed energy and enthusiasm. There were new things to see, new people to meet, new bearings to get, new routines to form and then discard after a few days. Sometimes there’d be a new language to not understand, too. Moving from place to place only gradually morphed from something exciting to something mundane, but in recent months it has become routine, bordering on tiresome depending on my mood.

I’m not sure why Edinburgh was different. As a destination it was an afterthought: I’d planned to go to Oxford and attempt a day trip into the Cotswolds instead, but trains from Oxford to Liverpool were hideously expensive, whereas I spotted cheap fares both to and from Edinburgh. And so it became the last place added to my itinerary, only a couple of weeks ahead of time. I got off the train, though, and felt that half-forgotten buzz of anticipation about a new place that I thought was lost for good. It was nearly midnight and the streets were deserted, but that only served to enhance the grandeur of the floodlit buildings on either side of the station. I was in Edinburgh! What was I going to do here? I didn’t know!

A bad hostel could have easily burst my bubble, but this place was the closest thing to perfection that £18 a night can buy. It’s all of ten seconds walk from the Royal Mile, the main road through the centre of the old town, and it’s inside a grand old stone mansion with a suit of armour propped up by the door, standing guard over reception. I’d been slightly concerned that they wouldn’t accept cash, given I no longer have a card, but it was no problem. The staff member handed over my key and directed me to the fifth floor. “Oh, and your bed’s name is Butterscotch.”

My bed’s name is… what?

“Butterscotch.”

I see. The bed has a name. That’s new.

Buttercup – sorry, Butterscotch, it’s a bed, not a cow - and I hadn’t met, and so going up and climbing straight in felt ever so slightly too forward. It was late, though, so I had little choice and Butterscotch didn’t seem to mind. They – I don’t think beds have genders – shared a room with three other beds named Chocolate Chip, Almond Fudge and Raspberry, and are very comfortable. They even had two pillows, a luxury that usually requires waiting until 1AM and stealing a pillow from another bed, with fingers crossed that nobody turns up later to demand their pillow back.

The staff member on duty the next morning asked how everything was. “Excellent”, I said, standing beside the suit of armour whose name, I now learned, was Arthur. “We’re getting along very well, considering we just met.” Then the bloke at the desk said he thought we were getting along too, and I had to clarify that I was referring to Butterscotch, not him. Awkward.

That morning I ventured out onto the Royal Mile and into a cafe that claimed to have vegetarian haggis. All I've ever known about haggis is that it incorporates the internal organs of cows, or maybe sheep? Haggis has never been on the menu for me before, so I tried to order it, but at the last moment I mispronounced 'haggis' as 'veggie burger'. Offal-themed local delicacies are really something you need to build up towards.

One of the relatively few things I knew about Edinburgh is that Arthur's Seat - the original, not the Mornington Peninsula rip-off - is there somewhere, and I thought I might climb it. My dorm mate George - a nanny from Perth (via London) who was sleeping in Almond Fudge until she found somewhere to live - seemed to think that was a very bad idea.

Having chickened out on eating haggis, I set off down the Royal Mile towards Arthur's Seat. The Mile is one of the grandest streets in Europe, lined with stately buildings on each side and full of statues of great Scots throughout history, including one of Adam Smith, the iconic founder of free market economics, who was most unfortunately covered in bird shit. How terrible.

The Royal Mile runs from Holyrood Palace, where the Queen stays when she visits Edinburgh and is unlucky enough not to stay in a hostel bed named after a dessert, to Edinburgh Castle at the other end, and it was only when I got to the castle that I discovered I was going the wrong way. So I ended up having to walk a Royal Mile and a Half to Arthur's Seat, but I didn't mind. It was such a glorious walk that even the bagpipes being noisily strangled to death at regular intervals didn't bother me. It was only once I was at the castle that I first saw Arthur's Seat, a full Royal Mile away, whose 251 metres of really quite severely vertical cliff face suddenly looked rather intimidating. Perhaps George was right. What had I gotten myself into?

I was psychically committed to reaching the top, though, so I dropped back into the hostel on the way and asked some pointed questions. Is the path clearly marked? Could a slightly rotund Australian, worn down by six months of travelling, reliably climb it in an afternoon before dark? Is it safe for diabetics? Unlike George, they were bemused by my caution. Apparently most people climb it comfortably in half an hour.

Bag fully loaded with as much sugar as I could carry, then, I headed down past Holyrood and the Scottish Parliament, where a path began that circled the mountain: I could either turn left or right and, perhaps guided by the invisible hand of Adam Smith I turned right. This was, naturally, a terrible mistake.

The path up Arthur's Seat brought to mind the very first thing I did in Europe, all those months ago, when I radically misjudged the benefits of riding a funicular in Lisbon. The gradient was such that I'd climb about 20 metres, stop for a rest, climb another 15 and stop for another rest. I suspected the people at the hostel were taking revenge for all the drop bear stories they'd suffered on their own backpacking trips to Australia. Half an hour? Surely that's nonsense.

Imagine my disgust, then, when I finally reached the top of the hill and discovered that I hadn't climbed Arthur's Seat at all. It was still right there in front of me. At best I'd climbed Arthur's Footrest.

The climb up the real Arthur's Seat wasn't quite vertical, but it was pretty close. I continued to take regular breaks, and at one point a young Scot from Aberdeen sat down beside me. "I knew I'd regret this half-way', I told him, 'and we must be a quarter of the way there, so I guess that means I'm half-way to regretting it." My companion looked up at the mountain above our heads, judging the distance to the top and said gently "you know mate, I'm not sure you're even half-way to being half-way to regretting it." Very encouraging.

I finally made it to the top after about an hour and a half, and took my time enjoying the view over Edinburgh, before turning to face the other direction, over Leith and the tongue-twistingly named Firth of Forth -

No. This wasn't fair.

Right behind the summit, where Arthur's Chairback should have been, was a grassy field that gently sloped down towards sea level, with dozens of people making the comfortable half hour walk up or down what just about amounted to a paved road. At least 90% of the people on the mountain had taken this craven, cheat's way to the top. They hadn't earned that view like I did. It wasn't right. I took the easy path down, of course, but I grumbled about the injustice of being able to do so all the way.

The Arthur's Seat climb consumed the only day of nice weather I enjoyed in Edinburgh. After a slow start the next day, reluctant to leave Butterscotch, I headed out to the zoo via a pub for lunch, where I thought I'd ease into the haggis with something without the awful connotations of internal organs, but otherwise just as bad. And so I learned that trying to eat a brown onion gravy-immersed vegetable pastie and mushy peas whilst sheltering from the rain is the sort of thing that might prompt one to emigrate from Scotland.

I roamed restlessly on my last day in town, strolling across from the Old Town to the New Town, which was only a sprightly 300 or so years old. It turned out to be a stately take on a relatively boring shopping district, but I was at least treated to the sight of a busker playing bagpipes that belched fire at climactic moments in the song. The flames are really handy for when you’re trying not to notice that you’re listening to bagpipes.

After shuffling about in the rain and taking shelter in the (free) National Museum of Scotland, the dark sky brightened just long enough to check out the Camera Obscura, a contraption near the Castle that was rescued from being unacceptably tourist-gimmicky for this jaded backpacker by being a) open since 1835 and b) pretty cool in spite of itself. Don’t ask me to explain the physics of it, but it consists of a dark room at the top of the building, in which sits a big white sheet. A hose-like apparatus runs from just above the sheet to a hole in the roof, and when the light passes through you can see what’s going on outside, as if from a CCTV camera. The bloke in charge pointed the hose up and down the Royal Mile, using a sheet of paper held underneath to ‘pick up’ people as they walked, blissfully unaware, before dropping them back to the pavement. Such novelties were quite the rage in the Victorian era, before we all got too easily bored by space travel and microwave popcorn to appreciate technical marvels.

It was time to catch the train, but first I had to face my fears. A hole in the wall just off the Royal Mile offered ‘baked tatties’ in a dozen or so vegetarian formats, one of which was haggis. I fronted up and ordered, but my voice must have betrayed my anxiety because the bloke serving offered to let me have two smaller tatties instead of one big one – one with haggis, and the other with something edible. The haggis turned out to be an anti-climax. Take out the entrails and what I was left with amounted to oats, onions and spices. It was fine in a ‘I don’t need to do that again’ sort of way, and better than the mushy peas

I was heading to Liverpool, a pilgrimage to the home of The Beatles. I arrived late to a hostel that had all the depressive air of decay that my wonderful home in Edinburgh had lacked. The beds here didn’t have names: they barely had mattresses. The free breakfast amounted to a loaf of bread, left at irregular intervals in an abandoned kitchen. The wifi didn’t work, and so I was cut off from the world until mid-morning, when the only other guest in the place showed me how to hack into the network for the university campus next door.

It wasn’t a great deal better outside, where the weather was persistently British, but I headed out and straight for Matthew Street and the Cavern Club. I bought a ticket for that night’s Beatles tribute show and spent a happy couple of hours sprinting through the rain from one Beatles-merchandise store to the next, talking myself out of buying everything from guitar picks to a set of 13 coffee mugs, each printed with a different album cover. I don’t play the guitar, and I don’t drink coffee, but it was really only end-of-trip poverty that stopped me from going on a spending spree.

Staying on Matthew Street – the rain was really too heavy to consider going anywhere else – I had lunch in a pub that proudly identified the booth where the pre-Fab Four would hang about before gigs at the Cavern. They chose that spot, apparently, because it provided an ideal vantage point to peek into the women’s bathroom whenever the door opened, where their fans were dressing up for the show. I pulled out a book and like The Beatles before me, waited out the rain before the show. You’ll be pleased to know there’s now a wall that shields the women’s bathrooms from view.

The book was a Robert Harris thriller set during the Munich conference where Hitler played Neville Chamberlain for a fool, and I continued to read it as I lined up for the show. Standing next to me were a middle-aged couple from South Africa, by way of Brisbane. The husband was a doctor, whose name I’ve forgotten so I’ll call him Dr Robert, and he was already two sheets to the wind. He spotted the book, asked what it was about, and after I handed him the blurb to read he began to tell me of his admiration for Winston Churchill. The proudest moment of Doc Robert’s career was when he was volunteering at a steam train festival in South Africa and the guest of honour, Winston’s daughter, had needed treatment for angina.

He went on at length about Churchill and his brush with fame, but he was genially inebriated enough that I didn’t mind sharing a table inside, not least because it meant I could roam about a bit without losing my spot. He talked a lot before the show started and his wife, who I shall call Michelle, talked much less. I asked what she did – she was a nurse – and we talked about that for a bit before eventually moving on to talking about South Africa. At some point Doc Robert mentioned that Michelle was Nelson Mandela’s nurse when he was treated for cancer.

He said it casually, like nursing Nelson Mandela daily for several months was nothing compared to having once checked Winston Churchill’s daughter’s pulse. Michelle smiled the smile of somehow with an incredible story to tell and no need to bring it up, because Dr Robert would surely get around to it eventually.  They must be used to being met with skepticism, because Robert pulled out his phone, where he had a family photo with the great man ready to show off. “This is me, and this is our daughter…” he was pointing to the photo, “and this is Nelson –“

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have laughed. “Yes mate”, I laughed. “I know that’s Nelson.”

I steered the conversation away from Churchill and back towards Mandela – The Chief, as Michelle called him – every chance I could. I asked a lot of questions, but remember very few of the answers. What I do remember is that Michelle was adamant The Chief was every bit as humble, as magnanimous, as forgiving and as decent as he appeared to be. And for that I’m glad.  

The show itself was much more fun than a tacky tribute show has any business being. John was bang on, and so was George. Paul’s vocals were a bit stringy, but just like at the Real Sir Paul’s concert I attended a couple of months later, the crowd carried him through the difficult bits by singing along. The usual Ringo missed the show due to a Ryanair cancellation that day in Dublin, and so the bar owner’s 16 year old son stepped in. It’s not the first time Ringo’s been replaced on drums without anybody noticing the difference, I suppose.

I did very little the next day, which I’d set aside as a do-very-little day to allow for the Swans to play in a preliminary final before Geelong rudely interrupted. Aside from finishing the book, I hopped on a bus down to Penny Lane for lunch, but got there to find a surprisingly short and less than bustling suburban street. There wasn’t a banker with a motorcar or fireman with an hourglass in sight, thought there was a barber – open Eight Days a Week, a sign on the door said, but closed on this Saturday – and a chip shop that I’m sure would have sold me four of fish if it hadn’t also been closed. I took the obligatory photo of a heavily graffiti’d Penny Lane street sign, and left.

It was time for the last destination on the trip, and an anti-climax. Dublin started well enough, with one of my favourite things – a ferry ride, complete with spotting a seal in Dublin harbour – but it didn’t capture me. I roamed around Temple Bar, only to find that there’s nothing to it apart from Irish pubs, but they were Irish pubs only in the sense that they were in Ireland, and they were pubs. Like Florence with its Renaissance and Amsterdam with its vice, Temple Bar is a parody of itself, a Sovereign Hill in-situ, offering up the same Irish pubs you’ll find in Australia, in the US, in London or wherever else Irish Eyes Are Smiling™.

I wandered in and out of Trinity College, struck by how it’s burdened with the same split personality as so many other ‘things to do’ in Europe: for me it was a ‘thing to do’, but for the students around me it was just uni, and I didn’t belong there during class time just as I didn’t belong in churches during services. I roamed to the post office, which was at the centre of the doomed Easter rising in 1916 – where museum exhibits put the romance into pointless slaughter. I sheltered from the rain in another new museum near the docks, which focused on the Irish diaspora. They featured Tadhg Kennelly and Jim Stynes, which is fair enough, and Ned Kelly, who they’re welcome to have. They claimed Barack Obama, which was a little more tenuous but all very well, and then Che Guevara, which came as something of a shock.

I was only here for a couple of days, but I wasn’t taken by the place, and worse, I was only here for a couple of days. I’d arrived on day 197 of 200. It was impossible not to think of all the ‘lasts’: the last ferry, the last hostel, the last change of currency, the last bus to the airport that was only hours away. Bored and preoccupied, I found my way by accident to the Dublin train station. I sized up the departures board, playing with the notion of a last minute day trip to Belfast, Kilkenny, Limerick or Cork, but I was out of time, and anyway, I was tired. The bad news was there were so many places I’d not yet been to. The good news is there’s so many places I’ve not yet been to.

Ten or so days in London

I was slightly disappointed by how easily I got out of the Netherlands. My Schengen-busting schemes were about to be put to the test. I had email confirmation from the various embassies to tell me what I’d done was legal… or rather, they’d told me that what I told them I was doing was legal. My imagination was filled with things I might have overlooked, loopholes that had closed before I tried to squeeze through them, i’s I had failed to dot, t’s that had gone uncrossed. I had intended to save copies of all my hostel booking confirmations on my iPad, but – disaster – the Booking.com app only saved the ones for the past couple of months. So I spent two hours painstakingly going through my emails and collating the dozens of email confirmations instead. And I went through and retrieved all my train tickets for good measure, too.

 

I was prepared for this to take some time, and that I might have some convincing to do, so I headed to the ferry terminal a good two hours early. With no small amount of apprehension I approached the immigration desk. “Ah, hi guys. This might be a little complicated. You’ll be able to see in my passport that I’ve actually been in the Schengen zone for 135 days, not 90, but it’s legal, because I’m Australian.”

 

Silence for several very long seconds, then a very neutral-sounding question. “So why have you over-stayed your visa?”

 

“No, um, I haven’t over-stayed…” I explained, just a little shakily, that I have an email from the Dutch embassy in Australia. “Here, let me show you! There’s an exemption that applies to Denmark and Germany too, so I crossed into Denmark on day 90, and…”

 

By this time he’d finished reading the email. “That’s ok”, was all he said, and he stamped my passport.

 

Talk about an anti-climax. You don’t want to see my train tickets? Go through, day by day, to work out where I was at what time? I spent two hours finding these hostel bookings, don’t you want to see them? We’re not going to take this to an interview room, where I would have two hours to convince you to let me on the boat? Do you realise I have a blog to write and need some drama?

 

*

 

I had a strange, vaguely unsettling experience when I visited America two years ago. There I was, on the other side of the world, in a place that was instantly familiar, but didn’t quite feel real, because the things about it that were familiar had *never* been real. And I’m not talking about the instantly familiar landmarks, like the White House, though I’ve written before that they didn’t ‘become’ real until I’d seen them for myself. I mean the little details in the background of those famous scenes.

 

School buses were the most obvious one. Australian school buses typically look like ordinary buses, but movie and TV school buses are yellow, have slightly rounded roofs and either a kindly old driver or a wise-cracking mean one, depending on the type of movie. Traffic lights are different in the movies too: they’re not on poles at the side of the road, like real-world traffic lights, but instead dangle from wires over the road. Then I got to America, where school buses are yellow and have slightly rounded roofs (I didn’t speak to any drivers), and traffic lights dangle from wires over the road. I’d stepped onto a movie set, and the nagging sensation that I was in a not quite real place, with not quite real buses and not quite real traffic lights, didn’t go away. Arriving in London for the first time is much the same experience. Grey skies. Black cabs. Red mail boxes, phone boxes and double decker buses. Police officers with funny hats. I’ve seen this show on the BBC.

 

But it was good to be home, after six months away. Or not quite back home, but clearly somewhere closer to it, even if I’m geographically further away than I’ve been for most of those six months. The cabs and buses might be the wrong colour, and I don’t know why they still have the phone boxes at all, but the cheap chocolate in the supermarket is Cadbury Dairy Milk, not Milka, and the supermarket has self-service checkouts again. Yes, I feel guilty about using them, but you have no idea how many hours I spent lining up in European supermarkets. Cars drive on the left side of the road, which I had been worried about, but the crossings have ‘look left’ signs painted on the road to help travellers from Europe (like me) to survive. I did stand on the right side of an escalator by mistake – force of habit – but I’m just relieved I remembered not to speak slowly and ask people if they speak English.

 

Adding to the sense of an almost homecoming was the fact that, apart from a walk, the first thing I did was something I haven’t done for six months: greet a familiar face. I crossed paths with Lindy only briefly – she was leaving London the morning after I arrived – but it was a delight, after so long, to begin a conversation with something other than ‘hi, I’m Charlie. I’m from Australia. You?’ And Lindy managed to avoid asking the question I have no idea how to answer. For future reference, if I see you at home and you ask ‘how was your trip?’, I’m going to stare at you blankly for a while. It’s been so many things, for so long, that there’s simply no way to answer. ‘Umm… good’ probably won’t cut it.

 

I didn’t have time for much more than a brief walk before my catch up with Lindy, so I headed from my hostel – surprisingly good, apart from tiny beds that even I wouldn’t have fitted into if I were any more elongated – across Hyde Park, starting near Kensington Palace. I ignored the Palace – Lindy and I might have been the only two people in London who didn’t care that Prince George had started school that day – and instead turned east, towards Westminster, which was a good three kilometres of park away. I went past the ‘Round Pond’ and… well, I know the English are fond of euphemisms, but it has straight sides. These people can’t even name a straight-edged pond in a straight-edged fashion. 

My path did eventually take me to another palace, but let’s be honest: Buckingham is an ugly grey slab of a building. I tried to remember whether the flags meant the Queen was or wasn’t in residence, before I remembered that I really didn’t give a toss either way. It was only when I saw my third palace in less than an hour - the Palace of Westminster, the Mother of Parliaments, with Big Ben visible between the trees from St James’ Park, that I admit I got a little bit excited. I’m a democrat.

 

I lingered back at the hostel for much of the next day, watching Richmond beat Geelong in the final that would determine who the Swans would play when – err, ‘if’ – we beat Essendon the next morning. Richmond won, surprisingly, postponing their inevitable finals humiliation by a fortnight. To avoid making too little of the day, afterwards I headed to the British Museum, which was open late on a Friday. 

The Museum is where the British ruling class stores the spoils of three centuries of empire: it has most of the Parthenon Marbles, whose absence from the Acropolis Museum I railed against in my blog post about Athens. It also has the Rosetta Stone, which Egypt wants back, an enormous collection of brass plaques, the Benin Bronzes, sought by Nigeria and Benin, and who knows how many more contentious pieces claimed by how many former colonies. The Museum’s response has typically been to shrug their shoulders and say ‘finders keepers’, but apparently they’re at least discussing sending the Benin Bronzes back to Africa, so maybe the Greeks have a snowflake’s chance in hell after all. A very small snowflake.

 

As much as I’ve wrestled with the ethical dilemma of what to do with such treasures – I won’t labour the point here – I have to admit the Museum was a guilty pleasure. I had arrived shortly before four o’clock, and with the late closing time I thought I might get through it all, but then the first room proved to be carved straight from the pages of a Victorian novel, lined with wooden bookcases, stacked with leather-bound books, surrounding cases and cabinets of curiosities. I spent more than an hour in there.

 

Luckily the Museum is free (though you’re forced to stop and decline to pay a ‘suggested donation’ on the way in), because I had to come back later in the week to finish it. And I had to do the same at the Imperial War Museum, which is similarly free (minus the suggested donation). I was surprised to discover that the latter only really begins with World War I (conveniently skipping over most of the ‘imperial’ wars Britain fought along the way). It’s also been done up very recently, and it’s mostly too modern in a city whose museums ought to be a little stuffy. It made up for it by having an exhibit called the ‘Bureau of Alternative Facts’, where visitors were invited to write their own explanations for various objects and events. Of all the many institutions I’ve visited in Europe, the Imperial War Museum is pretty much the last one I would have expected to be throwing shade towards Donald Trump.

 

I had another catch up planned for my first Saturday evening in London. I hadn’t seen Lindy in seven months, but I hadn’t seen Tilly in seven *years*, with a couple of near misses during her visits to Melbourne along the way, so catching up again was one of the highlights of a city that was, itself, one of the highlights of the trip. Tilly and I share a love for Paul Kelly (the singer: I’m not sure if Tilly shares my love for Paul Kelly the Swans legend, but I’m quite positive we hold Paul Kelly the journalist in equally low regard), so when I saw he was playing in Shepherd’s Bush – the London suburb that’s ground zero for Aussie expats and backpackers alike – it was the perfect occasion.

 

The crowd was almost exclusively Australians, I think. I spotted a Richmond beanie – surely the furthest into September that beanie had ever been worn – and the bloke next to me had flown all the way from Stockholm just for the concert. His enthusiasm for singing along was inversely proportional to the quality of his singing voice: imagine a sea lion with a sore throat, roaring out How to Make Gravy as if his is the only recipe anybody in the theatre should ever hear. I took to holding my water bottle, a little awkwardly, up to my right ear, which he hopefully didn’t realise was because I was using it as noise insulation to drown out his dreadful droning.

 

I had an even slower than usual start the next day, but eventually roused the energy to walk to the Sherlock Holmes Museum. It’s located at 221B Baker Street, an address that didn’t exist in Arthur Conan Doyle’s lifetime, but was created for marketing purposes afterwards. Getting inside is frustrating: you have to buy tickets in the gift shop, but you only find that out after queuing outside for 20 minutes and then being told, typically by a kindly fellow visitor rather than a member of staff, that the line is only to enter, not for tickets. So I’d queued twice by the time I got inside, where a staff member actually was on hand, in period costume, to walk us through the place.

 

It’s set up exactly as it was when Holmes and Dr Watson were in residence, we’re told, and all the items – from smoking pipes to chemistry equipment – are from the 19th century. Our attention was directed to a photo of a woman – the woman – allegedly Irene Adler, before we were asked to turn and face the wall, where bullet holes trace the letters ‘VR’ in the wallpaper. The patter continued as the guide pointed out mementoes from various cases, but without mentioning or even hinting that none of this was real or that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character. 

Increasingly bemused, I sidled over to another guide and asked how many visitors believed Holmes was a real, historical person. He thought for a moment, perhaps wondering whether he should answer honestly or risk shattering the illusion, before estimating that it was about 30%. I must have looked as dismayed as I felt, because the first guide came over after finishing his spiel and asked what the question had been. “He asked how many people believe in Sherlock Holmes”, his colleague explained, and the guide looked shocked. “I believe in Sherlock Holmes”, he said, turning to me, his expression blending surprise, sadness and suspicion. “Don’t you believe in Sherlock Holmes?”

 

Chastened by my apostasy, I decided to play along, and signed the guest book as ‘James Moriarty’ before I left.

 

I headed to the Tower the next morning, an improbably beautiful one to be in London. To be honest I’d become a little inured to castles and palaces, just as I had to palaces, but the Tower was just one of those places you go to anyway. And the history here is particularly interesting to me, as this was the site of what was arguably the world’s longest running zoo. Animals were kept here, typically in appalling conditions, from around 1204 until they were finally shipped out to the new zoo in Regents Park in the 1830s. The king’s menagerie focused, naturally enough, on ‘kingly beasts’ such as lions and tigers (there was also a polar bear that, according to legend, was allowed out into the Thames on a leash to go fishing), and many were kept in the same single room inside the walls. It must have been a Hobbesian environment, with big cats roaring and swiping at each other from one cage to the next. It exasperates me so much when I hear people with no background in zoos dismissing them as “cruel”. There’s always scope for improvement, but go to London and stand inside the Tower Menagerie. Then head over to London Zoo, where you can compare and contrast 19th century exhibits – no longer used, but the zoo is stuck with them due to heritage protections – and what they’ve built in the past 20 years. See how far we’ve come.

 

I’d been at the Tower for perhaps 90 minutes when the improbably beautiful morning turned into the inevitably dreary afternoon. I took shelter inside the gallery containing the Crown Jewels, which was over-stuffed with both ridiculously expensive fripperies and American tour groups, but I could only feign interest in the former and tolerance for the latter for so long, and gave up and headed back out into the rain. I crossed over to the Tower Bridge and was weighing whether to pay to go up inside when the rain turned torrential, and my umbrella – a flimsy thing that had somehow survived since Saint Petersburg – surrendered entirely. I spent the next 15 minutes huddled beside one of the bridge towers, head down and face turned away from the rain, and thought how wonderful it was to be having an authentic British experience. I didn’t get another consecutive two hours outside without rain for the rest of the week, but I didn’t replace the umbrella: I couldn’t find one for less than £15, and I have been known to be stubborn.

 

The next morning I ducked out to the Tesco for supplies, got to the self serve checkout and… my card was declined. That’s weird, I thought, because I know there’s still plenty of money on it. I assumed the machine was dodgy, so I hopped across to the manned counter and tried again, only to have my card declined a second, more embarrassing time. I scrounged some coins from my wallet, paid, and hurried to an ATM… where my card was declined.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

 

I still had my back-up debit card from home, but I didn’t want to use it. The now mysteriously useless card was pre-loaded with pounds and euros, whereas my back-up card only had Aussie dollars, which it would helpfully convert for me at a murderous exchange rate. Meanwhile, although those pounds and euros would still be there when I got home – I’d jumped online to check, they were mercifully still there – they’d hardly be much use to me there.

I finally got on to the card company, at the expense of a mad dash to a post office and very much unwanted UK phone card. Sure enough, somebody had tried to rip me off. They’d failed at stealing my money, but succeeded in getting my card cancelled, and the only way I’d be able to access those euros and pounds for the rest of the trip was through a series of Western Union money orders. I was back in the cash economy for the next three weeks, but at least it had happened in September rather than March. I was also down to just one of my original three cards, after the Russian misadventure, so between that and carrying large amounts of cash around I was ending the trip even more security conscious than I started it.

 

It could have been worse though. I’d already intended to linger back at the hostel the next day – the Swans were playing a semi-final, which I was of course entirely relaxed about – but that was only confirmed as a very good idea as word filtered through the breakfast room that there’d been a bomb go off in the Tube. The attack was at a station about 3km away: I’d just met and enjoyed chatting to an Australian actor named Jesse who was heading that way for lunch, so I doubled back to give him a heads up to avoid the area. I kept an eye on The Guardian live blog for any updates (happily, nobody was killed), and settled back into bed to watch another train wreck – this time at the MCG. It’s my fault. I should have stayed behind the Iron Curtain. I know that now.

 

Mood thoroughly soured by the footy, I retreated to my happy place: that is, I went to Parliament. It was only when I was halfway there on the train that I remembered there’d been a bomb on a train in London that very morning. I looked around: the train was as full as they’d been all week, and people were busily tapping away on their phones or chatting to the companions as normal. We were all keeping calm and carrying on, just like we should. We can literally beat these people without even thinking about it.

 

There was a protest of some sort outside Westminster. A hundred or so elderly men, many wearing Army caps and medals, were gathered around another old gent who was speaking into his loudspeaker. He got about a minute into his prepared remarks before somebody persuaded him to stop and turn the thing on, and when we could finally hear him he announced that he’d just thrown his medals over the fence into Downing Street. I turned to one of the veterans standing nearby and asked why he would do such a daft thing. They were ex-servicemen who had fought the IRA in Northern Ireland: the bloke who no longer had any medals is facing murder charges over an operation he was involved in. I have no idea whether that’s justified, but the veteran I spoke to had an excellent point. Many IRA militants received amnesties for their own actions during the Troubles, but Army soldiers are being prosecuted.

 

I sensed that these blokes were a little new to this street protest caper, and it was reinforced a couple of minutes later. The climax of the event was the imminent arrival of one of their supporters, who had ridden his bicycle all the way from Edinburgh to attend. He was due any minute, and so a cheer went up when a cyclist appeared down the street, heading straight towards the crowd. And the cheering continued as the cyclist, who had evidently not ridden all the way from Edinburgh, continued on through without stopping, bemused by all the fuss. I left the veterans to resume waiting for the right cyclist and went inside.

 

There are no photos allowed in Westminster and it was only a short, self-guided tour of some key rooms, but I stayed for two hours anyway. I knew both the House of Lords and the Commons were small, but I wasn’t prepared for just how small: nearly 650 MPs cram in for Prime Minister’s Questions in a space smaller than a tennis court. I was told I had to stay standing and shouldn’t linger while I was in the chamber, but I feigned low blood sugar, gained permission to sit and stayed for a few minutes. It is, after all, my happy place.

 

And so is London as a whole. It’s the most familiar, the least exotic, the least challenging place I’ve been, but that’s no bad thing this far into a journey. In fact, it’s just the thing.