The Park Lane had this pleasant citrusy smell in the lobby, and the Palm Court always had a weird blend of Aloft-ish music, AM-era soul, and gypsy jazz playing overhead. It made for an atmosphere more suited to a G&T than a pint, which I guess is rather the point of a posh Mayfair hotel from the Bright Young Things era. The club room access – which made for free breakfast, more than one grazing dinner and a steady supply of fizzy lemonade and blackcurrant jelly babies – didn’t hurt either. Leaving there felt a lot like the vacation was over – it meant leaving Shepherd Market behind, but it also shifted into a slightly more urgent phase of things where it was important to make sure nothing important got missed.
Speaking of missed, we spent maybe two hours at the British Museum, and blew off the V&A altogether. I think what we found is that we were overwhelmed with the volume of things we were only marginally interested in, and that slow museum-trudge is hell on your back (and my shoulder) after a while. I think it was the right move – what we wanted was to see the city. We spent a lot of time in the front seat of the top of a bus, rather than on the Tube or actually walking, and that worked out well enough that I didn’t feel the need to walk down the King’s Road on foot. What stands out in retrospect was how many things we didn’t revisit – I mean, we were always going back to Borough Market, but we never set foot in the Shard. We didn’t circle back to Gibbons’ Rent or Camden Market or the Transport or Canal Museums or go to any West End shows or football matches. We mostly went out to be around things we hadn’t been near before, with the aim of seeing all we could see, and for the most part it worked well.
The Park Lane feels like home, too. I meant it when I said that every time I step out the door onto Piccadilly and turn left felt like the first day of the honeymoon all over again. “Shout to the Top” tends to come on in the AirPods all by itself, and you’re on the right side of the road for a cab or bus straight into the heart of the West End. (And a good thing too, because the slope up to the Green Park tube station is a lot steeper at 50 than it was at 33.) We were there with my mother in 2010 as well, and there aren’t a lot of non-Disney hotels outside San Francisco I can say I’ve stayed at three times. I don’t regret staying at the St Pancras, the creepy paintings in the hallway aside, and I’d sure liked to have been closer than the furthest room down the hall so we didn’t start every day using up a quarter mile of walking – but it’s not something I feel the need to repeat, whereas the Park Lane just feels special in a way that makes me hope we can stay there again in autumn 2027 or whenever we inevitably return.
It also felt good to go out and do things with people. We had a couple of dinner gatherings, but we also went out to pubs twice with friends, once for a roast and once just to be out and about – which ended up with a trip to Popeye’s and a return trip on high speed rail. To be out with my boot heels on foreign cobbles in the company of friends is something we haven’t had since Ireland, and it filled a hole in my reality that was so much bigger than I thought – after sheltering and cocooning long enough, you can almost convince yourself that you’re content with your own company until you realize there’s an alternative. Hopefully we get to make more of it now.
And there were minor things, too, but no less valuable for having them. I was able to actually make conversation in a pub a couple of times (ok, one was technically a craft beer bar, details details). I was able to visit Oxford without being consumed by regrets and angst about The College Thing, which means maybe the distance and the therapy are finally paying dividends. I got the closest straight-razor shave of my life, which put me on notice that such might be a replicable indulgence here, and the one bad day I had was fixed with a quiet Saturday night upstairs in a Mayfair pub with red flocked wallpaper – which makes me think that it’s about time I gave the Duke of Edinburgh another chance of a Sunday night, of which.
I think the biggest and most precious thing was: I stayed punched out. I didn’t perseverate on work, or politics (US domestic, anyway), or the backlog of things that have to get done here, or the looming drama and trauma in Alabama in May. It would have been so easy to get consumed by other stuff, which I think is no small part of why the heat took me out entirely in 2016. For the first time since the first time, I got to visit London with my sweetie and no sword of Damocles in sight, And the desired result was obtained, handily.
So now the thing to do is start planning for the next thing. Sometime in 2023, hopefully, it’ll be time to go somewhere else again, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have two or three thoughts on the boil already.