The best laid plans

I was really looking forward to last Thursday. For well over a month I had had a trip to London arranged with a friend. We were going to do London in a day and it was going to be very exciting. I was going to catching the Megabus from Hull at 6.50am, getting into London at 11.20am, having the whole day and evening to see what there was to see and then clambering back on the train at 10.25pm, arriving back in Hull at 3am on the Friday morning.


I was really looking forward to it up until Wednesday afternoon when my friend decided to cancel on me.

I was left with a few options.

a) Cancel the trip altogether, the tickets had only cost me £10.50 so I wouldn’t be massively out of pocket, and cancel the two days I’d booked off work.

b) Cancel the trip but keep the two days off work.

c) Go to London.

I decided to be brave. I was geared up for a jolly holiday and damnit I was going to have one.

Going to London in itself didn’t bother me at all, it’s not like there’s nothing to do there after all, but my main worry was the evening/night portion of the day – I didn’t particularly want to be trekking round the streets in the dark until 10.25pm.

I know a few people in London but none who were good enough friends that I wanted to contact them and see if they wanted to meet up for the weekend – there was only one person that I did contact and she had selfishly gone to Bristol for a new job.

And then it hit me. What could I do in the evening in London that would not make me a target for tramps and thieves but would be interesting?

*Cue lightbulb above head moment*

I could go to the cinema.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will know where I’m going with this. Anyone who’s new to the show, let me enlighten you. I made a list of Not Really Resolutions at the beginning of this year, one of which was to go to the cinema on my own. In the last update I was despairing of getting this one completed, mainly because I couldn’t for the life of me work out why I’d put it on there. I don’t go to the cinema at all so the notion of going on my own was, quite frankly, bizarre.

And yet, here it was, like a shining little beacon – coming to save my day in London. This is how I would fill up my evening in London and cross off something on my list. Useful and efficient – that’s the kind of activity I like.

With my evening plan vaguely sorted there began the quickest planning of a day in London ever. I didn’t want to go without an idea of where I wanted to go because I did that on 1st January and it was bloody irritating and I ended up not seeing anything.

In a couple of hours, and thanks to the Curious Cat and Google Maps and Street View, I officially had an outline of my day in London and it was going to look a little something like this:

National Portrait Gallery (I have still never been here in all the times I’ve been to London)

Museum of Childhood

Gallery Cafe

Persephone Books

Renoir Cinema

Home

And I will tell you tomorrow if all went according to plan...