21st century view

The Shard

View from the Shard

View from the Shard

A Midummer Night's Dream

With Bridget in Mayfair

In a city that is over 2,000 years old I start off today’s fun with the View from the Shard a sleek new building opened in 2012. The Shard is the tallest building in Western Europe, last year it was my homing beacon to find London Bridge station to make my way home. Now they have the newest tourist attraction in London with 360 degree views at 800m high. The ride up in the lifts is fast, smooth and quite. There are about 50 staff along the way directing you in into lanes big enough to cope with hundreds of people. There are about 10 people here visiting. The View from the Shard is constantly bagged by Londoners as too expensive to visit and obviously not yet popular with the tourists. That’s a bonus for me. The view is impressive, London stretches out for about 40 miles in every direction. All the main points, like Buckingham Palace, St Pauls, the Thames are laid out in front of you. They have really good telescopes that have an interactive ipad like screen with everything major place named. Its an amazing way to see London laid out in front of you. The photo frenzy commences. Time to walk up the steps to the outdoor viewing platform, there are about three people up here, it is cold and windy but not much different to the first view as the glass windows are above your head. Its so high up the planes and helicopters buzzing around London are level with you. Then like any standard attraction its time to exit via the gift shop, this one is on the 72^nd floor that makes the highest gift shop I have ever been to.

Next on today’s tour is a total contrast. I take a trip back to Elizabethan England with a play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre. From the first moment the actors enthrall me. Haunting music, fight scenes, loves scenes, amazing acting and something always happening on the stage. I can understand how they get to the hordes entertained all those years ago and the story works so well today. The theater holds 3000 people but feels so personal you can see the actors faces clearly and hear every change of tone in their voice with no microphones or 21^st century paraphernalia. The crowd laughs along with the jokes and every single person is enjoying themselves, even the plebs standing up for 3 hours in the rain in the pit. A wonderful escape into a different era.

Now like the seasoned traveler I am I squish onto a peak hour train at Southwark and travel the few stops up to Green Park. I escape into the relative quite of Mayfair and head for Embassy Mayfair for dinner with Bridget, who I worked with at AMP. Tiffany’s, Cartiers, Boodles and all kinds of fancy shops line my walk. A quick detour up Saville Road to see if Warren or James Bond is there buying a new suit and then onto dinner I go. Bridget is looking great and we chat for hours just like we had seen each other yesterday, a wonderful night!