London, is the place for me...

...except when it's not.  Which admittedly is around 90% of the year.  I only tend to visit the smoke for shopping and/or cousin visiting around twice a year, bumble around some markets, tut at shuffling tourists and then fall asleep on the way home.  This time was a bit different.  This time I went for a break.  Granted, half term in London isn't that quiet, stuffed to the brim with crocodile lines of school kids in the brightest caps their school could buy all led by a teacher who looked like they had probably aged 30 years in one day.  You could almost see them mentally re-counting the kids as they stressfully barked things at them ("Away from the road!", "That's not our bus!", "No, you didn't vote for them either!"...that sort of thing). 

I took my time to look at some of the buildings that weren't squashed by The Hun during the war and reacquainted myself with Southbank and all the concrete on top of it.  I walked around the Houses of Parliament for the first time in years, right up the Monarch's Entrance.  The hallowed halls where Margaret Thatcher became 100 times less popular than she already wasn't, 'Tony Blair: Warmonger!' was first staged, Nick Clegg did...er...  and now just houses something that resembles a condom stretched over a Gala melon.  Which is a total waste of a melon.  I also visited Borough Market for the first time.  Half full of people choosing a suitable Instagram filter for the photo of the Bison Burger they just took and half full of hipsters buying mung beans for their vintage Star Wars lunchboxes.  Good food though, I reckon (with my particular medical complaint) I'd have been dead by tea time had I eaten everything I wanted to.  A massive amount of lovely stuff to chew on.

Truth be told, I went to London this time to stop mattering for a while.  London isn't the first place that that springs to mind when you fancy a break.  Unless you like hundreds of clammy bankers and blue suited city types or wrestling your way through galleries packed with tourists in strange paper masks trying to avoid a norovirus or just really enjoy playing Flappy Bird on a tube train full of people wondering when they can check Facebook again.  But that, this time, was the whole point of going.  London is so ram packed full of people that the level at which you matter decreases significantly to those around you.  Especially if you're on your own.  If you're on you're own you can sink right into the background and do nothing at all of any consequence.  After all the nonsense of the last few months that's exactly what I needed.

I'm back now having regenerated into a fresh new version of the same character I've always played. Ready and raring to go...

(after I've beaten my high score on Flappy Bird...)