I SPENT a couple of days in London at the start of the week and unlike my recent trips, the weather wasn’t grey and wet.
The sun shone like it supposed to in spring and I felt distinctly over-dressed in flannel trousers, jacket, V-neck jumper and wool tie.
Mind you, if I choose to dress for a trip to our capital city like I’m in a cameo role in the Christmas special of All Creatures Great and Small, I probably deserve all I get.
The weather was so pleasant that I walked around London rather than jumping on the tube.
The hotel I was staying in was in Victoria on Vauxhall Bridge Road and from my bedroom I could look out at the rooftops of Pimlico and the striking Westminster Cathedral, built of brick in a neo-Byzantine style (according to Wikipedia).
I realised that the hotel was situated almost exactly opposite the office where I was based when I lived and worked in London in the late 1990s.
The Press Association building at 292 Vauxhall Bridge Road seemed very modern and sophisticated at the time.
It has since been knocked down and replaced with a glass-fronted hotel while the kiosk where I stopped for my morning coffee and toast (I didn’t arrive at work until 10am because I was working as the London Editor for a morning newspaper, the Cardiff-based Western Mail) is now a kebab shop.
From the hotel I walked across Victoria and traversed Buckingham Palace, thronged with pre-Covid numbers of tourists.
As the Welsh national newspaper’s ‘man in London’ I used to get some interesting and exciting invitations and one was to attend a garden party at Buckingham Palace.
I didn’t know anyone and didn’t have a clue why any any of the guests there had been invited and so I ended up wandering around the gardens of the monarch’s London residence.
With sunglasses on and my brick-like mobile phone bulging in the inside breast pocket of my suit, I imagined I looked like a member of the security team guarding the late Queen.
On reflection, what I actually looked like was a rather callow journalist in an ill-fitting suit with no one to talk to.
From Buck House I strolled through the verdant sun-dappled Green Park towards St James’s.
Where else in the world can you see a trooper in scarlet tunic and bearskin walking home from work?
My favourite street in London is Jermyn Street and it was bustling with activity with hedge fund managers sipping drinks at pavement restaurants and suited young men congregating for beers on the pavement of pubs on the streets running off it.
Every smartly-dressed individual who walked by looked like they had a story to tell and I was torn between people-watching and seeking inspiration from the windows of the menswear shops that line Jermyn Street like elegant dominoes.
Then I strolled past the statue of Beau Brummel, seen as the patron saint of well dressed men, up Princes Arcade and into the courtyard of the Royal Academy where I saw the arresting and fascinating sculpture in the photograph above.
It is called The First Supper and was created last year by Tavares Strachan.
Crafted in bronze, black patina and gold leaf, the sculpture “celebrates the act of sharing a meal” and features 12 historically significant activists, writers, musicians, explorers and political leaders from the continent of Africa and its diasporas including Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey and Haile Selassie as well as the sculptor himself.
It was a nice bit of culture interspersed into my aimless wanderings trying to get inspiration for a gift for my wife’s birthday next week.
OK, I accept, looking in the windows of the boutiques on Jermyn Street and Savile Row probably didn’t provide any inspirational ideas.