London: We Got The Funk

London’s a great place for celebrating birthdays. I’ve even worked out a birthday route of sorts. I got to help organise two separate birthdays in the space of about a week. As of this moment, I am at least fifty per cent cake. Mmm.

Alice’s birthday first, then! Maddie and I arrived at Alice’s house in the morning and serenaded the birthday girl mid-shower. Maddie had to go off to uni for a couple of hours, so it was up to me to guide Alice through the first of the activities that we’d planned for the day. We got lost, of course. But it was okay, because in getting lost we arrived somewhere much more exciting: the Black Books shop!

A particular highlight was our discovery of a book called In Defence of Beards.

We then made our way to the University College of London, which, incidentally, looks much like I’d imagined King’s would. The campus is basically beautiful, set right in the heart of Bloomsbury with marble facades and grass and Jeremy Bentham’s corpse, which was obviously the reason we’d come. Jeremy Bentham was some loony English social reformer and the ‘spiritual founder’ of UCL. His will stipulated that he was to be stuffed and mounted on display in UCL, much like Lenin and Mao. Unlike Lenin and Mao, his head was pinched by a bunch of King’s students at one stage and booted around as a makeshift football. It now resides in a locked case in the UCL basement.

In retaliation, some UCL students stole the King’s mascot lion and buried him in cement save for his tail – but I don’t think the lion’s on display.

Apparently the UCL staff wheel Jeremy out on formal occasions and set him a place at dinner. Amazing, these Brits.

After the Bentham birthday adventure, we headed into Covent Garden and met Maddie at a nifty vegetarian restaurant for lunch. We then wandered through Soho, found a great comics shop, did coffee in a place with vaulting equipment instead of tables, and then ended the day at a charming sort of cocktail pub.

And then it was Maddie’s birthday. Once we’d wandered through Bloomsbury to this really nice French patisserie, I reworked my Alice-birthday steps and took her to the Black Books shop in the next street and then to Jeremy Bentham. I think we’ve established a birthday tradition of paying one’s respects to the crazy headless dead guy at UCL.

We then caught a bus to Piccadilly Circus, where we visited St James Church and eventually met Alice at the foot of the Eros statue. Having dropped them off at a rather fancy restaurant for lunch, I headed over to King’s for a criminology lecture. See, Mum, I haven’t completely forgotten my studies!

We met up again in Hampstead at this fantastic café that served the most delicious chilli hot chocolate in London [she says with limited experience]. I got a free umbrella out of it, and Maddie and Alice almost got free coffees as they forgot to pay, and had to dash back from the tube station to do so.

Next we took the tube to Soho for steamed buns in Chinatown, which weren’t nearly as good as Box Hill pork buns. Then we wandered over to Ain’t Nothing But, this squashy, fabulous blues bar, where we saw a band of the following description:

"Robert Hokum is 'a funky spanking of the blues'."

Yes. He was.

So in short, those were two of the best days I’ve had in London. And if your birthday’s coming up and you’re in London, Jeremy Bentham and I will show you a funky spanking time.