November 2010 – March 2011: Communist Embassies, Olympic Athletes and Anarchist Graffiti

It’s been a while since I updated this blog – 4 months to be precise. That’s 4 months of what so far has been 7 months of working 40 hours a week, travelling 4 hours a day and sleeping 6 hours a night. For a large part of the last quarter of a year my one hour’s escape from the daily grind of commuting and working has been all too infrequent. Hourly adventures around the capital have become a few minutes’ dash to the many nearby sandwich shops and takeaways. And there are many – within 10 minutes’ walk from where I work, you could easily go somewhere different for lunch every day for a year. It’s very tempting and very convenient – I think I’ve made myself one sandwich in the last 3 months. From Greggs to Pret, McDonald’s to Pizza Hut, Subway to small Italian cafes – I’ve had my fair share of lunch time junk food.

From that list you’ll see that my choice of food is not very adventurous – so far I haven’t been tempted by Japanese food which seems to be very popular in my office at the moment. Last week a colleague of mine from Manchester was describing his love of sushi – it was all a bit weird, with his strong Manc accent you’d expect him to be talking about his love of meat pies. Stranger still was the occasion when I noticed a Dutch colleague of mine preparing his lunch in our small kitchen (or in 21st Century office speak a ‘breakout area’).  It seemed pretty normal at first – plate, salad, dressing, crunchy bread and then I saw the raw baby octopus. I stared at it: Raw. Baby. Octopus. No thanks. Certainly 3 words I never want included when describing my food.  I left him to enjoy his strange lunch and then messily devoured a sausage roll at my desk.

One of the reasons I haven’t ventured out very often in the last 4 months is because most days the weather has been rubbish and the workloads have been high. This has led me to eat my lunch in perhaps the unhealthiest way possible – scoffing a sandwich at my desk. Millions of people across the country spend their lunchtime the same but that doesn’t mean that it’s right. It is very wrong. As Chris Evans once said, lunch should be ‘less al desko and more al fresco’.  Al fresco is the way forward and when it’s sunny outside it’s a waste to be indoors. I am writing this on the train, it’s nearly seven pm and it’s still light outside – beautiful.

Returning to the dark days, one of the few highlights of November’s lunchtimes was a visit to the Vietnamese Embassy in Kensington. There are many embassies in Kensington – one of the most expensive locations in a very expensive city. Who pays the rent? Is it the UK taxpayer or the Vietnamese? Either way we’re both getting ripped off just so some dignitaries can do their work in a nice part of town. I was there because a work mate of mine, a member of the original group of lunchtime adventurers, was going to Vietnam for his brother’s wedding and needed to get their visas. We got there fine – the Tube journey to South Kensington and walk along Kensington High Street was quite pleasant, we didn’t have too much of a problem finding the embassy as it had a large Communist flag outside; the only problem was when we tried to go in. It was shut for lunch – for 2 hours. No wonder we live in a Capitalist society if the Communists have a 2 hour lunch every day! It was a wasted lunch hour for my colleague who had to come back on his day off, but still a fairly interesting one for me.

December meant Christmas shopping, which I still managed to leave to the last minute. There was too much choice, so I went for the usual gifts – chocolate, perfume, toiletries and gadgets – the only difference was that they were bought from posher shops and were more expensive than normal. Other than that lunchtimes in December weren’t that great as the weather was bitterly cold and the streets were full of tourists.

Apart from the odd enjoyable occasion when I enjoyed good weather, food or company, sometimes even all three, most of January and February’s lunchtimes were the same forgettable trips to nearby sandwich shops. Into March and so far I’ve had a few enjoyable lunchtimes with colleagues walking around the usual sights which despite their familiarity still seem pretty impressive to me. Walk south across Waterloo Bridge on a sunny day and the view is amazing – to your left St Paul’s, the Gherkin, Canary Wharf and the Oxo Tower, to your right the Millennium wheel and the Houses of Parliament. It’s the bridge where reporters film from when they’re doing a piece about London. Walking there is a normal everyday activity for me but still a pretty special one.

To celebrate the belated return of spring, I went to the Porterhouse, my favourite Covent Garden pub, with a workmate last Friday. We enjoyed a well-earned cold bottle of beer as we stood outside the pub and surveyed our glorious surroundings. Then my mate spotted James Cracknell the Olympic gold medal rower, just causally walking past off to buy lunch and talking on his phone. It marked London celebrity number three for me – other than Alan Sugar at his book signing last year, I spotted Frank Skinner getting out of a taxi near Covent Garden one cold February morning.

Other than spotting the odd famous person going about their daily business, London is also a great place to be when an important event is happening. The Budget was last Wednesday, so I went with a couple of workmates to wander past Downing Street and then the Houses of Parliament to see if we could walk behind a film camera and get on TV.  We didn’t see any cameras but we did see a member of staff trying to enter the Downing Street gates in order to deliver a McDonald’s. We joked that it was for George Osbourne for when he finished his speech. 

Today we walked to Trafalgar Square again to see the remains of the graffiti and vandalism that took place on the same day as the TUC rally against the government cuts. Nearly half a million people protested peacefully against the cuts, while a few hundred caused chaos in central London. It was unsurprising that the media focused on the latter event, so we went down to Trafalgar Square to see what all the fuss was about.

Nelson’s column and his 4 lions were covered in anarchy symbols and various bits of crude graffiti – ‘Fuck the cuts’ was a popular slogan, ‘Cameron is a cunt’ was another, while someone with a historical grudge had chosen to spray ‘the party starts when Thatcher dies’. The general tone and artistic quality of the graffiti was pretty simple and says much about those who wrote it. It certainly highlights that it had nothing to do with the hundreds of thousands who joined in the TUC rally.

It was quite funny to see the dozens of tourists having their picture taken in front of Nelson’s Column – they went away with truly unique photos thanks to the graffiti in the background. They couldn’t climb on the lions though – as the lions and Nelson were fenced off while a couple of contract cleaners removed the paint. To do this they used a bottle of methylated spirits, which is probably similar to what those who had written the graffiti had been drinking.