Set[ting] foot on one's own country as a foreign land

Walking today across Covent Garden piazza towards Trafalgar Square, I thought to myself: I need to do this more often.  I need to be a tourist in London.  Except for a year that I spent back in Cambridge to study for my MPhil, I have lived in London since September 2005 and there are too many places in London that I still haven't seen.  Today, I scored one of those off the list.  Well, I say 'list', I haven't actually made one yet, but I intend to.


I went to the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden. On a Saturday. At half term.  Normally I do my best to avoid London's tourists (part of the reason why there are quite a few places I haven't been to...) but it was one of those bright, crispy days so off I went.

The Transport Museum was great and is definitely worth a visit; especially if, like me, the fact that TfL manages to keep most of the tube network running at all is fascinating.


I spend my life with a pen in hand, marking up documents.  Unbelievably, there is a prescribed sequence of colours for the order this happens in with a different colour for each 'turn' of the document.  I think it goes red, green, blue, orange, violet.  Lawyers spend their lives point-scoring by noticing extra spaces and missing capital letters.  I do think, however, that our innate pedantry can be A Good Thing. I even like to think that I notice things that some other people miss: these bricks were on the side of a Pizza Hut (of all places).

And, amidst the hubbub of Trafalgar Square,  this beautiful, partly frozen fountain.

So, here's to appreciating our local areas with the eyes of a tourist (and the lens of a camera) and to scoring some more of those as-yet unseen places off the 'must see' list (once I actually get round to making it).


C