Wellcome, Mr Bourne

Today I visited the very cool "Wellcome Collection" museum in Euston. Of note in the permanent collection were Florence Nightingale's moccasins (who seems to have been a better nurse than stylist), Napoleon Bonaparte's toothbrush, and Charles Darwin's walking stick, all of which can be viewed in a slideshow.

I also snapped a photograph of a Bourne Ultimatum film location on York Road near Waterloo Station. If you've seen the film, you'll know exactly what I mean.

The Farewell Tour

Number one in my list of lessons learned from Cher, is that when you finish a job, you don't just go quietly into the night. Oh no. You have to leave in a big way, with colour, excitement, and costume. You have to drag out the departure to that excruciating point where people are not-so-secretly wishing, and practically begging, that you'd just bugger off already.

With that in mind, and in lieu of Cirque de Soleil, I busied myself in my final weeks at The Firm with a grand Cher-esque farewell tour of all the things in and around EC4 (the region of the city where The Firm is located) that I had failed to find the time to visit in my lunch breaks, before work, after work, on weekends, or at any time for that matter, despite working in the same location for three torturously long years.

First up, here is Twining's original shop on the Strand. Note how it's a single story building squeezed between two much taller buildings? That's because it dates from 1706. This was Mr Twining's original tea room. Now it sells overpriced tea and biscuits to tourists, and unwitting locals. How overpriced? Well, let's say that if you happened to be returning home to Australia in 2006 for the first time in nine months, and happened to shop here, then you could have saved around 30% by buying the exact same items at Heathrow Airport.

Then I visited Dr Samuel Johnson's house. It is here that he wrote the first decent English dictionary. There were dictionaries before Johnson, but, as I learned at the museum, those earlier efforts had unhelpful definitions like "Red: a colour". Johnson is also famous for his aphorisms, one of the best known being "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." Of course Mr Johnson didn't have to travel on the over-crowded under-ventilated Central line every morning (when it's running), negotiate in Polish to purchase an Iced Caffe Mocha, or put up with idiots who become technologically incompetent - and slow down - when presented with "high-technology" items like a cash machine or a railway station ticket barrier. Because if he did, I think, he might have thought a little differently of the place, and tired pretty bloody quickly.

The Golden Boy of Pye Corner is a fat golden cherub who marks the spot where the Great Fire stopped burning and all the fat kids started eating pies to celebrate. And, of course, I mean the Great Fire of 1666. There were other hugely destructive fires in London, of course, but they were not as great, it seems, as that in '66.

Most people I know visit St Bart's to attend the GUM clinic. But everyone needs to know it's grossly underfunded and they like to tell you to come back in two months to "get that resolved", so no-one ever really needs to visit... but if you do, the hospital museum is kinda neat, in a grossly underfunded kinda way. The Hogarth-painted staircase is impressive. Personally, I liked this little plaque which memorialised the fictional first meeting of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. No doubt the good doctor had returned from Afghanistan with a raging urinary infection, and was waiting to be told to come back in two months.

St Bartholomew-the-Great is a fantastic church tucked between St Bart's Hospital and Smithfield Market. At one time it was a huge church, now reduced to maybe a quarter of the original size. The interior is breathtaking, and instantly recognisable. It's featured in many films, including Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Shakespeare in Love, The (very boring) End of the Affair, Elizabeth, The Golden Age, The Other Boleyn Girl. I remember it as the church where Hugh Grant didn't get married in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

I wandered through Smithfield Market - which always excites me, for reasons that I don't fully comprehend, but perhaps because it's a meat market - down St John Street, through Passing Alley (which apparently was originally and appropriately named Pissing Alley), to St John's Gate. This was the south gate to the Priory of St John, home to the Knights Hospitallers. The Order of St John bought the gate in the late 19th century, and its now the headquarters of St John's Ambulance. There is a museum here, which I found rather boring, and don't recommend you waste a valuable lunch break to visit.

The London Silver Vaults is amazing. Built to be private-hire vaults for London's wealthiest, the demand didn't satisfy the business plan, so it was turned into a bizarre shopping mall. Three stories below ground, you can wander around the rabbit warren of corridors, and peer into the shops (converted from vaults, but retaining the heavy vault door) which are filled with all things silver. Naturally security is tight, so I didn't risk taking a photo.

After a brief visit to Staple Inn, I can say I have visited all of London's inns of court, but I've never been to me. The most interesting of the inns is the Middle Temple and Inner Temple complex, located adjacent to The Firm. It's here that Temple Church is located, built for and by the Knights Templar in the twelfth century as their headquarters. It will be familiar if you've read the novel, or seen the film of The Da Vinci Code. (And that reminds me, Dan Brown, Akiva Goldsman, and Ron Howard still owe me two hours of my time, that I will never get back).

Nearby is Inner Temple Gardens. Shakespeare set an opening scene from Henry VI Part I here; it's the place where one man picks a red rose, and another man picks a white rose, and so began the War of the Roses. I know I am over-simplifying a great work of art here, but surely the general gist is more important than the burden of detail? (Oh, and incidentally the "white rose" people won, which is why it appears over the top of the red rose on the Tudor Rose logo. There you go!) Anyhow, it's here that the progenitor of the Chelsea Flower Show was held, before moving to... Chelsea. This year, being the 150 anniversary, a special one-off Flower Show was held. The Firm sponsored it, and while I have no interest in gardening, I felt it my duty and obligation to relieve the firm of one ticket that might be used on something unimportant like entertaining a client who clearly doesn't need the free ticket if they can afford The Firm's outrageous fees. What is relevant, is that this is the location where I enjoyed my last Pimm's and lemonade for Spring/Summer 2008. The fruit alone accounted for one of my "five-a-day".

Continuing the never-ending tour of all things odd and vaguely interesting, I trekked up to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons on Lincoln's Inn Fields. This is the thinking man's Ripley's Believe It or Not, with an amazing collection of human and animal bits-and-pieces, including Europe's oldest anatomical preparations and the 7'7" skeleton of the tallest man who ever lived. A lot of stuff is too freaky for words. If you have a burning desire to find out what the skeleton of an eight-week old fetus looks like, then this is the place for you.

On the other side of Lincoln's Inn Fields (largest public square in London, and thought to be an inspiration for New York's Central Park, as Wikipedia tells me, so it must be true), is Sir John Soane's museum. Before it was a museum, it was his house. Soane is one of London's famous architects, and his house is real nice to boot.

Right opposite Whitechapel tube station is Royal London Hospital, which looked after Joseph Merrick in the late nineteenth century. There is a little museum hidden away in the hospital, and I visited so that I could see the exhibition dedicated to Merrick. There I saw the actual mask and cap worn by Merrick, plus the cardboard model church that he constructed. The model church is dramatised in the film, but it is not, in reality, a model of St Phillip's Church, located adjacent to the hospital.

The Firm is a sponsor of Historic Royal Palaces, so I used my freebie pass to gain entry at Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London. I've been to the Tower before, but wanted to go back and check out the Crown Jewels again. Quite vulgar really, but only in that way that they're vulgar because they're not mine. Hampton Court Palace is great. It's just what a palace should look like, I think. I was overjoyed to find the entrance to the last two grace-and-favour flats in the entire complex. At one time there were seventy flats housing the freeloaders.

On my second last day, I celebrated my imminent departure by having lunch with my friend, and fellow City worker, Martin at Vertigo 42. This is the Gary Rhodes operated champagne bar on the 42nd floor of Tower 42. I can think of no braver way for us to have marked the seventh anniversary of 9/11 than lunching at the very top of the tallest office building in the City, in the heart of its financial district.

Madrid Pride 2008

In July, which seems like a lifetime ago, when it was summer, which seems like a lifetime ago, I went to Madrid for their annual Orgullo Gay pride event. Part of me loves this event, because it's Madrid (wonderful city), and it's Spain (mucho gusto), filled with latin men (ditto), and it's always sunny (unlike London).

However, the bit I don't like is that I end up spending almost the entire time surrounded by people from London. It's like the special holiday episode of a bad 70s American sitcom where the "whole gang" win a "surprise vacation" somewhere, with various subplot contrivances that facilitate the entire cast to also miraculously holiday in the same location at the same time. And as we all know, the rule of the sitcom is that the story must resolve, by the end of the episode, to exactly the same point where each episode began. The Brady Bunch always end up loving each other, and the castaways always end up back on Gilligan's Island. Likewise, I always end up partying among a bunch of people from London - some of whom are just as vain, self-absorbed, and arrogant when abroad - and one week later, we're back home. Repeat.

Anyhow, here are some videos I shot from my time in Madrid this year. First up is the Infinita party. This is the main event following the parade on the Saturday night. Infinita is always held in a stadium, and around 20,000 people attend. This year's event was poorly run, with ridiculous queues. We queued to collect tickets, we queued to get in, we queued for security, we queued for drink vouchers, we queued at the bar, we queued for the toilets... and then they finished the event more than 1½ hours early.



The next night, all the same people went to a much smaller venue called La Riviera for the SuperMartxe party. This was much more intimate, and much more fun. Clearly the €30 cover charge does not meet the organisers costs though, so next year I'd prefer to pay double if the organisers would deign to switch on the bloody air-conditioning. Apparently, it was rota. Sure, whatever. I've been to some sweat-boxes in my many years of "going out" (Turnmills, anyone? Please, let me press the button on that sweatshop)... but this year's SuperMartxe was unreal. Even Tina Cousins stopped her (backing-aided) performance, to whine about the heat.

Pouring Rain

The bad news is that I will continue to be burdened with employment; the good news is that I have a job.

So it's the evening of the day that I'm told I no longer have a job with The Firm, come September 12... I'm determined to make this into an opportunity, and so after gym, dinner, reading some blogs, discovering (to my horror) that I'd put the equivalent of £50 through the washing machine after Soho Pride, wasting an hour on Gaydar et al, and checking my downloads, I touched up my CV and posted it to four job sites around midnight.

The following morning, having woken from a necessarily zopiclone-induced slumber, my phone starts ringing around 8:30am. It was a recruiter. While speaking with him, I heard the call waiting announce two more calls. Within two minutes of hanging up, the phone rang again. Again, more calls on call waiting. As soon as I got out of the tube at Chancery Lane, I received a text message advising me I had three messages... and the phone rang again. And this is how the next 24 hours played out. Between Wednesday morning and Thursday lunchtime, my phone - almost literally - did not stop ringing. My voice mailbox filled; that's fifty messages. Somewhat wizened to the sharkpool of IT recruiting, I wasn't sure what to make of it all.

The most significant of these phone calls from recruiters was one guy who was desperate to send me CV to a private equity firm. He did so on Wednesday morning, and by 1pm he rang me back to arrange an interview at the client company... for the following morning. I figured this was all a load of bollocks at a shite firm, but was keen to go along with it. I couldn't have been more wrong. The job was a good one, at a large private equity firm in the heart of the West End. Now, I happen to think that private equity might well be the devil's work... but fortunately I've been whoring myself to big companies for years, so I'm hardened. This doesn't bother me anymore, provided they pay, and the price is right.

What is important is that the work sounds interesting, the offices are beautiful, the IT department is not in the basement, and there might be the possibility of travel to the other offices. So things look really good, on paper. How this all plays in the real world, I am yet to find out. But for the moment, I'm breathing a sigh of relief, as I might have dodged a bullet - and a bout of unemployment - just as the country tips into dark times.