Seven Dials Which Are Actually Six

Monday August 2nd

Today we packed ourselves up, and tied the house ready to travel back to London and then on back to Sevenoaks. Hamish came over to collect the rubbish. The rubbish is really the only negative thing about staying at Trenchard Lodge. It is a great facility for the military families but one of the rules is that you take all your rubbish with you. I guess this would be fine if you had a car, but when you are on foot what do you do with it? We seemed to have managed to nearly fill a black rubbish sack this time.

Hamish dropped us at the tube and we got off in Bond St to go to the HSBC. I am still trying to track down the pin number for my card. So we went in and I handed over my passport. The guy I gave it to was ages and then came back and said it hadn’t arrived yet. As I won’t be back in London until early October I guess I will have to wait until then. I have requested that they send one to NZ, but they probably won’t send two. So this meant I still have no card to shop with which may be a good thing.

I did fight my way through crowds in Primark to buy some cheap socks. The queue to buy had at least 50 people in it with 10 processing at tills, but it was tiresome. So we caught the tube back to Tottenham Court Road and had lunch at a Weatherspoons with free WiFi. I was again stopped by tourists and asked directions, which I was only too happy and able to give. We must have lost the dazed look where you walk around looking at street signs with a map in your hand and stopping all the time to look at all the weird and wonderful things in London. Mind you I did end up in Seven dials yesterday which was somewhere I had never been before. Seven Dials is a small but well-known road junction in the West end of London in Covent Garden where seven streets converge. At the centre of the roughly-circular space is a pillar bearing six (not seven) sundials. Some people think that the reason there are only six sundials is that the plinth itself is the seventh casting a shadow in the ground. I was careful to choose the street I had come down to walk back out ,as walking out another one could have taken you a long way from where you started.

Alan spent some time in the bookshops and I had a trawl through TK Maxx, but didn’t find the ultimate bargain. We walked back through Trafalgar Square to look at the instant hedge maze that had appeared overnight but didn’t have time to go through it. So it was back on the train from Charing Cross to Orpington and Phil picked us up on his way home from work.