Pip Pip, Bob’s your Uncle

‘Ello ‘ello, how we doing mate?

I’m on a quick trip to the UK, crashing Kat’s “gardening ladies” tour of fancy flower shows and fancy yarn stores. The main motivation for my trip is to attend the Silverstone F1 race this coming weekend, but I’m spending a couple days in London by myself before heading out to the track.

We’ve only been to London once before, and that wasn’t a very long visit. This will only be a few days as well, but I do feel like I’m getting to know the city a little bit. As much as I love living in a glorified suburb, being in a real city is pretty lovely.

Kat, myself and all the gardening ladies left Minneapolis Monday night and had an easy flight, landing around noon on Tuesday. After getting everyone setup with their e-sims, we said our goodbyes and I caught a bus. All of Europe is experiencing a heatwave at the moment, and it was upwards of 90 degrees when we arrived. An hour on the upper deck of an un-airconditioned bus had me missing the states just a bit.

My bus took me to Aviation Retail Direct, a Mecca for a very, very specific type of nerd, not too far from Heathrow. Plenty of stores can you sell you a small model airplane for your desk. But not many stores can sell you a Delta A330-300 in a specific livery, or perhaps a British Airways Airbus A318 with the CFM56-5B engine choice. Sadly I’m not enough of an anorak to actually collect these sorts of things, but as a fan of BigJetTV who is that much of a nerd, I had to visit. I bought myself a 1:200 scale version of the aforementioned Delta A330, then caught the train to Shoreditch to check in to my hotel.

For dinner, I met up with Kat, Jill and Anneka at Pick & Cheese in the Seven Dials food hall. What’s Pick & Cheese? It’s a cheese conveyer belt restaurant. Duh. It showed up in my Instagram reels a few weeks ago, and I knew I had to visit. Sadly, we weren’t able to go on Wednesday when they have an all-you-can-eat option, but we managed to do some serious cheese damage. Basically there are about 30 different cheese or charcuterie plates circulating on the conveyer belt. You pick the ones you want, and they charge you based on the empty plates. We managed to get through 18 plates before we tapped out.

Thankfully, dessert is a separate stomach, so we visited Humble Crumble across the street to share a rhubarb crumble with frozen custard. Then we said our goodbyes for real – I won’t see Kat again until she’s back in Minnesota in two weeks. I decided to walk the couple miles back to my hotel, as it had cooled off a little bit.

This morning, I’m just puttering around in Brixton, waiting to meet up with my African and Caribbean Food Tour. And maybe spending a little time scrolling through the Skilled Worker Visa program…