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.
