I woke as Ady closed the hotel room door behind him with the children already awake and watching TV. I dozed for a while as the restuarant wasn’t even open for breakfast at that early hour and then we went down to eat. I’ve learnt my lesson with all you can eat breakfasts that eating all you can when you don’t normally eat anything at breakfast time is an error. Greed does not pay when it comes to sausage and bacon, croissants and toast and sugar coated cereals! 😆 Davies and Scarlett OTOH normally do eat fairly well at breakfast time at home and need to be coerced to eat lots to keep them going through the day until lunch.
We got back to the hotel room in time to watch Ady’s first show online and then decided to go and explore Putney. The bridge was being set up ready with barriers to control the anticipated crowds for later and bedecked with big balloons. We browsed the charity shops and bought some very cheap fleeces in Woolworths with camping layer-wear in mind for later in the year. We walked back along the other side of the road and performed a death defying dash across the five lanes of traffic on the bridge arriving at the hotel at the same time as Ady who made us all jump by getting out of the lift next to us 😆
After a cup of tea we decided to go and explore some more. We were not confident of getting back to Putney in time for the beginning of the boat race if we started heading into central London and everywhere seemed pretty busy too so we decided to stay local this time and just walk in the opposite direction from the hotel than we’d walked earlier. This took us into Fulham. A quick look at the ‘take the kids to London’ guidebook I’d borrowed from work informed me that the church opposite our hotel was the one featured in the film The Omen and that Putney Bridge is the only bridge in UK with churches at both ends. I am a walking London trivia trove these days ;).
We saw signs for Fulham Palace and museum so followed those and arrived at the palace
After a wander through some of the very impressive rooms where Davies and I enjoyed looking at dado rails, picture rails, fancy skirting, coving and ceilings aswell as fireplaces we came across the tea rooms. These were housed in the very grand back rooms complete with real fireplaces burning cosily away and furnished with little tables infront of every sofa, large coffee table books and selling tea in china cups and terribly posh cakes from cakestands with doilies 😆 Not really our natural environment but as we were hungry and Ady had his £10 expenses for lunch to spend we blew it on earl grey tea and two cupcakes to cut into four pieces 😆 Then we spent some time looking at the books:
We had a walk round the grounds afterwards and saw some green parrots flying noisily around. They looked very surreal and we talked about how some non-native animals now live wild in this country having escaped as pets or from zoos over the years. A quick google at home today showed parrots in London to be very common! All of the gates were locked which meant despite being right next door to the church grounds opposite our hotel we had to walk all the way round to get back there. We talked about how many people suffer injuries from getting impaled on metal fence spikes and how we could see why :lol:. We walked along a small section of the Thames where crowds were already gathering and ceremony and fuss starting for the boat race.
We had an hour or so back at the hotel as it was pouring with rain and enjoyed watching the live coverage of the boat race start on tv with the same view we could see from our hotel room window 🙂 Ady and I had large glasses of warming wine as a precaution against the cold then we wrapped up warm and walked across the road to join the crowds. We got a spot right at the front on the bridge against the barrier, Scarlett was on my back, Davies was on Ady’s shoulders and we saw the start of the race and then the many boats chasing after them. The crowds quickly dispersed with there being nothing to see once they’d gone so we went and sat in the hotel bar to watch the rest live on the big screen. The Boat Race is something I’ve never had any interest in really – if it happened to be on tv when I was near one then I might watch it but not being remotely interested in sport as either a participant or spectator, nor having any allegance to either university it’s all rather irrelevant. It was pure fluke we happened to be staying at Putney Bridge which is Ady’s hotel of choice for it’s proximity to QVC but as it was happening right outside our window it was nice to add it to our list of things we’ve seen and done :).
The kids had some chips in the bar while we had another couple of drinks by which point I was peaking rather early and laughing raucously with Davies as we recreated the story of the 3 little pigs and the big bad wolf making shadow patterns on the table and adopting regional accents for all the characters. We went back to the room, Ady popped out for takeaway to bring back for dinner and we all watched Willy Wonka on tv. I fell asleep on the bed around 8pm, Ady woke me at 10pm to try and tell me it was really 11pm and then I woke at 1am / 2am, wide awake and very thirsty. I drank loads of water but felt it would be rather selfish to turn a light on to start reading with 3 other people in the room so laid awake listening to London At Night noises for about an hour before finally falling back to sleep.