Lovely family day out on the London Eye.

 Lovely family day out on the London Eye.

We've been waiting for this day to arrive for just over three years now and how it was worth it. On Sunday afternoon my precious family and friends gathered together in front of one of the most stunning London sights, a remarkable piece of modernist architecture that you could hardly fail to notice even if you were slightly hung over from the night before in the local watering hole. 

On Sunday afternoon family and friends and friends of families all converged on the London Eye in London's slowly recovering West End. We're not quite there yet but the streets looked considerably healthier than they were during the whole of 2020 and most of 2021. The weird isolation, dislocation, estrangement and that ever present sense of haunting alienation was positively frightening at times. You were somehow denied the simple pleasures of a reflective lunch, a cup of coffee and a mouth watering piece of chocolate cake because a global virus had shut everything down. How frustrating. 

In fact truth be we were back together en masse. There was my wonderful wife Bev, brother in law Jon and sister in law Jo, extended members of your family, a cousin of Bev's family, Sally and her partner Michael and a whole mixture of friends and more families. It almost seemed too good to be true. But this was happening in front of us, before our very eyes. We queued patiently but knew that all those months of awkwardness, indecision and procrastination would be rewarded three years later with a good, old fashioned get together. 

But the central theme of the day would be the London Eye, a breath taking white wheel so enormous and it has to be said, impressive that you could hardly believe that any building could be quite so dominant. And yet there were the conflicting opinions about the London Eye. Some have wrongly dismissed it as a complete waste of money, the reason being its lack of mobility, the slowness of the ride once it gets going and just a sense of profound disappointment. Why bother to pay all that money when you can simply jump onto a train to the West End, wander along the Embankment, through the delightful parks that London has always had to offer and just enjoy the bustling streets of Regent and Oxford Streets? But why not?

It was a glorious afternoon to be among the people you care for and love to be with and some you've never seen before but were just thrilled to meet. We even noticed an ice cream van on our travels and that was the most pleasant of surprises. Tourists love to gloat about their West End pilgrimages, the shopping, the hundreds of eye catching department stores. the souvenir shops, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, the secretive alleyways, the back streets, the beautiful arcades, the buzzing cafes and restaurants. It was a moment and day to treasure. 

But this was certainly my first time on the London Eye and in a way it was both satisfying and hugely enjoyable. Any perspective of London has to be afforded the respect it deserves. Where would be without the old and the new London, the mysteries, the clandestine nature of the capital city when the West End goes to sleep? Or does it ever go to sleep? When there's nobody around in the wee small hours of the morning, you can probably drink as many brandies, whiskies and gins without feeling like an impostor. You'd probably be approached by a friendly copper to behave in the most impeccable fashion should the evening result in wayward behaviour but London loves you, embracing you with a warm hug. 

Here we were on the London Eye though. The ride itself seemed to take roughly an hour or so and it did feel as though we were simply floating on thin air. There was little movement as such and you were just suspended high up in the London sky without knowing quite where to look and what to look at first. You couldn't help but spot the refurbished and radically revitalised Big Ben. Big Ben hasn't been very well for ages now and looked like the ailing hospital patient who looked in desperate need of a visitor with a bunch of grapes. There were a couple of dodgy mechanism issues that seem to take an age to repair and fix but apart from that Big Ben was just the way we remembered it.. 

The face of Big Ben looked as if it had been thoroughly washed and brushed up about a million times. There is a clean looking, brown coloured facade that made you glad to see the old clock again. Somebody pointed out that the bottom of this most majestic of clocks was still covered in what looked like a thick white bandage at the base of the time piece. Slowly but surely the afternoon progressed as the familiar tourists skyscrapers stretched across the River Thames. 

In recent years of course the London landscape has dramatically changed out of all recognition. For well over 40 or 50 years the river looked rather dull and functional, grey and bland, dark and murky on a winter's day. All you could see was Big Ben and the House of Commons which had always been there throughout your childhood and nobody had bothered to add to the collection. My parents had driven through the City of London, which reminded you of a solemn graveyard. The Bank of England and all the surrounding financial powerhouses looked sad, neglected, sorry for themselves, alone in the world with nobody to cheer them up on a Sunday afternoon.

But now London is very much a 24/7 society, a huge concentration of multi culturalism, fast, non stop, always on the move, cosmopolitan, walking, talking, muttering, running after buses and trains. Now that we can all get back to doing what we were doing before the coronavirus, it's time for the adoring Americans to get out their maps, camera phones, selfies and their gently inquisitive mannerisms. The Japanese, South Americans, South Africans and Europeans will be, as usual, their charming selves.

What did stand out though were the modern structures. There was the Shard, the Walkie Talkie, the famous Gherkin and the Cheese Grater and then there were distant pleasure boats on the water, small clusters of timeless buildings which have withstood the ravages of everything Hitler could throw at it. There was the MI 5 building, the strangely constructed London Assembly building, the Festival Hall on the South Bank and the wealthy riverside apartments liberally sprinkled around it.

And at its leisurely pace the London Eye inched its way around in a complete circle. You glanced around at the contrasting images of the London skyline, the odd assortment of smaller towers combining neatly with its Victorian neighbours. At the end of this uplifting experience you smiled beamingly at each other and were grateful to be among such stimulating company, your lovely family and the people who mean the world to you. 

So it was that we all retired on this Bank Holiday weekend Sunday to the nearest available pub where once again lively conversations were resumed. We drank wine, we drank beer, we nibbled at savouries, chips and generally revelled in the moment of gleeful conviviality. It was an unforgettable day and one we thought we wouldn't be able to experience again for some time. But we did and unashamedly so. London looked great, brilliant and a joy to behold. Of course it's expensive, extortionately dear and you'd better be amply equipped with shedloads of money in your pockets because it's the capital city and it costs a second mortgage. But we're Londoners and proud of it. Go back to it as soon as possible because it misses you and you've missed it.