Mich got onto me yesterday about the fact that I hadn't posted in so long. I gently reminded her that she could post as well, but it seems to fall to me to be the one to attempt to tell the tale of a New Year in London.
After Christmas day, the day after - Boxing Day, was spent in recuperation. The following few days were fairly quiet as well, so not much to report, really. I went back in to work on Monday, and then our guests arrived on Tuesday, being my mom, sister, and grandmother.
Tuesday went more or less as I thought it would, with our arrivals too drained to do much other than sit and wait for night to fall so that they could go to sleep. Wednesday rolled around, and they all went on the Big Bus tour of London with Mich and the kids. (For anyone who is counting, that's Michelle's fourth time, so she can probably give you as interesting a commentary as the tour by this point - and I'm sure she'd be far more interesting than the recorded commentary.) I met up with them after work for the rail ride home, a trip to the fish and chips shop only to find it closed (until 13th January, no less), and finally, a stop at the local Chinese place for our New Years' Eve dinner. As we watched the London fireworks on the telly, it became clear that we had made the right decision by staying in - firstly, it was freezing out there - after a relatively warm week coming up to Christmas, the highest it's reached since has been maybe 40 - and secondly, there were half a million people out there watching the fireworks go off. Not exactly where you want to be, with or without kids. Dalton made it until midnight for his second year - he really wanted to last year, but as some of you may recall, we were actually on a plane at midnight, and we pressured him to go to sleep before then.
New Year's Day was a "stay at home" sort of day, after staying up late the evening before, and some of us weren't up until almost 10. The day after, I took my sister and my mom in to London for a visit of the British Library and the National Gallery. Mich then met my sister and I for a "pub crawl" - we managed to make it to the Coal Hole and the George Inn, the George Inn being the oldest galleried inn in London, frequented by Shakespeare and Dickens in their days, and apparently even mentioned by Dickens in one of his books.
Mich, my sister and I made it out again the following day, mainly for a trip to Abbey Road, where, yes, we tried to do the Beatles walk, but as one of us had to take the picture, we were missing two people - plus, traffic on the road was quite busy, and most drivers didn't care to wait for the tourists to pose for their pictures. That was more or less it for our London outings. We caught the train home and met everyone else at the Feathers for dinner for their first English fish and chips meal.
Mich took my mom and grandmother to Guildford the next day for some shopping while I rested up at home. And then Monday, we woke up to snow - enough that it stuck here in Merstham, and the kids went and played in the back garden until time for school. And I went to work, and our guests got in a taxi and went to Gatwick, and life is now slowly moving back to "normal" - whatever that is. The weather here continues to be cold - yesterday the fountains in Trafalgar Square froze, and apparently it was colder in parts of the UK than it was in parts of Antarctica. There's no immediate sign of it warming, so we're bundling up, and wondering (sometimes) why we forfeited January weather of 70F for weather of 30F.
I'll try to get pictures of some of the bits in the next day or so.
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