In which we arrive back in London, buy a bed, admire many other beds, and walk very little distance at all.

As far as we can tell, the ferry ride was uneventful. It may have been a tad foggy in the Channel, because the ships horn sounded several times throughout the night, which did rouse me a little from my sleep. But the gentle rocking of the boat soon overcame that and I drifted back off again easily.

Then it was 5:00am, which kinda sucked. Mostly because that’s when we had to wake up in order to take advantage of the free breakfast. Which we did. Blearily. It was odd for our first full English breakfast of the trip to be in a ferry cafeteria, but it was perfectly palatable. The wean was feeling a tad under the weather, a fact that she didn’t share for over an hour, so suffered through it somewhat needlessly as we had medications aplenty to counter it. But she soldiered through it. Fortunately, they anticipate either this or the need to eat and run, and offer breakfast sandwiches to take with you: bacon or sausage bap, with healthy portions of meat.

We scarpered back up to the cabin, packed, then joined the throngs of drivers waiting in the cafeteria while the boat docked, then joined the same throngs of drivers that headed to the car deck as ordered, before waiting in similar throngs to disembark. How the hell they get the freight trailers off the second story of the car deck, I have no idea, but I’m more than a little curious.

Next bit was boring: 2 ½ hours on the road from Portsmouth to Greenwich. London morning traffic. ‘Nuff said.

We arrived without incident, with only one misstep right at the end. Our destination is in an area of Greenwich that does not want through traffic. To prevent it, they put a gate across the road with a couple of wooden posts either side denoting the pedestrian entry. Or so I thought. Actually, it turns out that those wooden posts are positioned exactly 7 feet apart, which apparently is deemed just wide enough for a passenger vehicle. Quite justifiably, I think, I missed the first turn because I honestly thought that the road was closed. I’d have thought the same of the road that I was on if I hadn’t seen the car in front squeeze itself through the posts to the side of the gate. Seriously, I thought only the Night Bus could pull that maneuver. But, hey, I’d just spent four days driving Jersey roads at speed, so how hard could this be? Nerve-wracking, yes, but not hard.

Our next host, Mark, met us at the designated parking space, with parking vouchers in hand. We weren’t going to need the car for a few days – public transport in London is excellent, and I had absolutely no desire to experience city traffic from the driver’s seat – and needed a permit to park nearby. We unloaded the car, loaded the flat, and then did very little for a while.

This is a remarkable thing.

You see, Mark has a history. He is a phenomenal host, and an equally phenomenal tour guide. And he guides at speed, at length, on foot, dawn to dusk. “People’s feet have bled after a day in London with me!” is an actual boast. Or claim to infamy. Your call. He decided to take mercy on us this time and we had a blissfully unscheduled day. So we chilled for a while, then headed out on a simple errand. Mark’s air mattress was quite thoroughly intact, but the stopper was AWOL, thereby rendering the entire thing somewhat, well, deflated. So we were off to buy a replacement. We stopped in for stamps and a couple of Cadbury’s Cream Eggs, with a better cream filling than is available in the US. OK, these were peripheral to the stamps, but I was weak. I also got a free newspaper with my purchase, my first copy of The Sun, which I presume they were giving away because no bugger’d buy it. At least, I can hope. Still, it gave me an excuse to admire the nice recycling bins they had around the place. Next stop, Greggs. This time because my wife is weak. Greggs is a chain bakery with pretty decent pastries.

I have a history with Greggs. There was one just outside the train station I arrived at each morning on my way to college. I would jump in, pay my 15p for a cream donut or cream bun, shove the entire thing in my mouth, then peg it to class which I’d otherwise be late for. I developed the somewhat unique and, at an evolutionary level, entirely worthless skill of breathing around the pastry bunging up my mouth without spraying people around me with cream. Telling “friends” of this daily morning habit led to an incident years later that resulted in the rapid and unintentional application of a sort of partially-chewed-donut-pebble-dashed finish of my in-laws kitchen walls, which we’re not going to talk about now.

We finally got to Argos to buy the mattress. Argos is an interesting store model. It’s an in-store catalog shop. The front is small and has a number of identical kiosks with laminated copies of their current catalog. You find what you want, scribble the code onto a piece of paper, then move to the digital kiosk where you punch in the code, make payment, and take a number. At that point, some poor bugger goes running through the warehouse (or through a portal to another dimension for all I know) that is attached to the small store front and eventually comes back with your stuff, which they hand over at the counter. It’s like a brick-and-mortar implementation of Amazon, really. The precursor, if you will.

We grabbed lunch at a lovely little café which thinks of a slice of bread as something that you could, if necessary, defend yourself with. Talk about thick! Fresh made, hand sliced, and I’m guessing about six slices to the loaf. My kind of place!

We got things back to the house, then headed back out for a wander through Greenwhich park. It was all very British, at least to begin with. We passed a cricket match, a rounders game, the Greenwich observatory (home of GMT), and took a stroll through the rose gardens. They have, I believe, almost a hundred varietals in the garden, arranged nicely in their own beds, with a handy chart to tell you what you’re looking at. Some magnificent examples. One of my favourites was the Iceberg Rose, which was pure pure white and not at all like the lettuce.

After that it was back to the flat for microwave dinner, a film, then bed. The 5:00am start to the day was great way to mess up the recent recovery from jet lag, so we call fell asleep pretty quickly.

Wait! I almost forgot the cats! Now, as many of you know, I have no great love for cats. First, I’m violently allergic to them. It varies, but the extreme reaction is full-on extreme: tearing eyes, burning throat, nose like a faucet. Utterly wretched. Second, our own cats have caused “problems” in our house, which I’m just going to leave there. So the thought of spending time around cats is, to me, unappealing.

Mark has cats. But they’re a breed of Sphinx Cats, which means that they have no hair and are, as a result, somewhat hypoallergenic. Folks are allergic to different things in cats, such as the dander in their fur. No fur, no dander. But if you’re really lucky, you may be allergic to the natural oils or other allergens that they produce. I am, of course, really lucky in this and only this regard. But I came prepared – Walfinate (chlorpheniramine) antihistamine to the rescue. The cats are fascinating, though. They remind me of gremlins after you ignore the rules, but generally friendlier. Aang and Korra are quite friendly and happy for more company, especially company like my ladies who instantly started playing with them. I just sat and watched. Until Aang jumped on my shoulders, which was odd. Apparently, it’s something that they both do. Maybe the have some kind of parrot complex or something. Or maybe it’s something that Sphinx cats were trained to do all those years ago.

Anyway, there are cats. So there.