Day 9: Conspicuous Consumption & The Healing Power of Spicy Soup

Honestly, traveling by train is as stressful as traveling by plane. There’s still customs, and immigration, and there’s a childkin running around your ankles and he loses the ticket you gave him to play with, and you think that Club 3 means Car 3, until you get to Car 3, and you suddenly realize no, you’re in Car 12, and you start running, running, running with baggage banging around behind you and holding Mikey’s hand until he wants you to pick him up, and then alors, there you are, in your little nook of four chairs facing each other across the table and you start ordering wine, and you don’t stop until you reach London.

All that said, train travel is jolly. You can look out for farm animals, and unlike slower forms of transport, if you miss them, then more will be right ‘round the corner in about two minutes. And, again, the food on Eurostar compared to any plane is really good. Mikey ate all of his and then half of mine.

When we got to St. Pancras, we caught a taxi to the Soho Hotel to pick up the bags we left behind, and then on to our next hotel, the Corinthia. It had only been open a few months, but our taxi driver said in his opinion, it was the best hotel in London.

We checked in and went to our room, which wasn’t a suite, but had plenty of space for Mikey’s bed and lots of fruit and other snacks laid out. After we made a few phone calls, confirming plans for the next couple of days, we realized it was just us three. No fabulous friends to meet up with. Ian knew that he wanted to go to a restaurant called Bangkok for dinner, but it was up to me to plan what we would do in the hours up to that.

The first time I went to London, almost 20 years ago, I went for business and spent almost the entire time in a convention center (sorry, centre) in Islington. I managed to get out, and twice I caught a cab to a place I needed to go: once, to the Tower of London, and the second time, to Harrod’s.

With Mikey, we went easy and opted for Harrod’s. Next time, the Tower for sure.

Harrod’s is supremely depressing. Even when you go with a 2-year-old, and head straight to the 4th floor, where the pet store is, and you spend time checking out every puppy and kitten there. Even then. The rest of it is the most vulgar of merchandising to make the fair maidens of Beverly Hills blush. There is nothing without a designer label. Nothing for a 2-year-old to be excited about under 50 quid. And the elbowing and shoving to get to this shit which will be outgrown in no time makes one weep for western culture. And eastern and southern culture too, because it wasn’t just blond-haired blue-eyed folks doing the grabbing.

Mikey was obviously fine amid our angst. He’s pick up something, and if it was too horrible, which it always was, we’d say, “Look at that! Wow, what a thing. Let’s put it back now, because it doesn’t belong to us, right?”

It worked!

The boy was so good, we took him to a Waitrose (which is a sort of mini-mart) in South Kensington, where we let him grab whatever he liked and we bought it for him, like we wouldn’t do at Harrod’s. He was perfectly happy, particularly when he spotted a 6 pack of “Scotch Pancakes.”

“Are those pancakes with Scotch in them?” I asked Ian.

“They’re like American pancakes,” Ian assured me. “Little to no whiskey in them.”

Mikey loved them, and that’s most of what he ate when we went to Bangkok, the restaurant which made Ian remember life in London when he first moved there in the 70s. He was a punk, a dressing horse for Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, swathed in bondage outfits with a huge purple Mohawk. Bangkok was there at the time, with a delicious, burning, sinus-clearing soup, which was good then and good now.

“Picy!” Mikey said, and he was right.