Hot weather again
Managed to get up and out of the house relatively early, and headed towards the Cuming Museum. Very pleased with myself for being so organised, right up to the point where I reached the entrance and saw that it isn't open on Mondays.
Never mind, it is almost next door to Baldwin's the herbalists, a really lovely old-established and old-fashioned shop, where I was able to stock up on rose-water, camphor blocks for my winter woolies and some of their sarsaparilla drink.
The sarsaparilla turned out to be a real touch of nostalgia. I first tasted it when I was about seven years old, on a visit from the country to stay with my glamorous Aunt Margaret and Uncle Ed, who travelled about in a motorbike and sidecar and lived in a Guinness Trust flat near the Oval. She was a born and bred Londoner, and introduced me to a lot of other metropolitan pleasures, including Pies (with mash) and walks along the embankment. Somewhere I have a photograph of her and me feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square, which I'll post if I can find it. This was the first time I'd visited London, apart from fraught dashes between stations on my way to the Dublin boat-train. I'm pretty sure I remember the really old-fashioned black cabs that had an open platform by the driver for your luggage. There were still a lot of bomb-sites, covered in willowherb in those days, especially south of the river, and more people in more different shapes and sizes, than I'd ever seen before.
Never mind, it is almost next door to Baldwin's the herbalists, a really lovely old-established and old-fashioned shop, where I was able to stock up on rose-water, camphor blocks for my winter woolies and some of their sarsaparilla drink.
The sarsaparilla turned out to be a real touch of nostalgia. I first tasted it when I was about seven years old, on a visit from the country to stay with my glamorous Aunt Margaret and Uncle Ed, who travelled about in a motorbike and sidecar and lived in a Guinness Trust flat near the Oval. She was a born and bred Londoner, and introduced me to a lot of other metropolitan pleasures, including Pies (with mash) and walks along the embankment. Somewhere I have a photograph of her and me feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square, which I'll post if I can find it. This was the first time I'd visited London, apart from fraught dashes between stations on my way to the Dublin boat-train. I'm pretty sure I remember the really old-fashioned black cabs that had an open platform by the driver for your luggage. There were still a lot of bomb-sites, covered in willowherb in those days, especially south of the river, and more people in more different shapes and sizes, than I'd ever seen before.