EXCITING SOPHISTICATED LONDON

Fortunately, despite being half-awoken at an even stupider o'clock than he normally wakes himself up at, taken to an airport, driven from the parking facility to the airport in a minibus which very much smelt as if the driver or drivers were not correctly observing the ban on workplace-smoking, scooted around the brightly-lit airport for a while and then lightly depressurised, Edgar didn't cry much in the aeroplane, just a little bit during take-off until he managed to stretch his Eustachian tubes sufficiently to equalise himself. Certainly not enough to draw everyone's attention and irk anyone similarly suffering from sleeplack. His eventual calmness may have been aided slightly by ignoring the airline rule about keeping him facing forward whilst the seatbelt signs were lit in order to allow him to feed, for the innate comforting effect and the likelihood of it speeding up the ear-balancing process.

Once landed, he seemed unperturbed by the unpleasant smells and strange accents and remained awake and chirpy throughout the breakfast-process after we'd found my parents and chosen between the place which did food at the expense of decent coffee and the place which did acceptable coffee at the expense of effective food. Whilst hardly conveniently-sited for driving to London my parents had a number of pre-wedding duties to fulfil which would be easier if they took their own car down, for which they'd borrowed a car seat so that ferrying us from the airport to the hotel they'd stayed in the previous night could be added to the task list. I've visited about five of my sister's ten or more abodes in London but hadn't been down for a few years (with the most recent London-local interaction being her popping to meet us at the airport on our way home from New Zealand) and hadn't seen where she'd lived since shortly after she'd moved into the house she'd just recently sold her half of after moving in with Ralph. I had briefly seen chunks of Wimbledon and Richmond but not Kingston, in which we would be staying for one night in the room vacated by my parents, who were heading to their room in the venue one night earlier than us. After dumping stuff, ferrying things from the car to the room and then from the room to the car, sitting about for a bit whilst they drove off somewhere we left Nicky to sleep in the room and headed out for a wander and some coffee, eventually getting to the cycle/footpath alongside the river and trundling along it for a couple of miles. I would assume that the path was vaguely continuous with the other end of the Thames-side path we'd seen a few years ago when we popped down to the Dome to see Bodyworlds and along which we walked afterwards as far as the parliamenty bit.

At some point Clare and Ralph turned up at the hotel, Ralph unfortunately setting Edgar off a bit when he greeted him for the first time by bouncing him up and down, though it looked like mere passing wariness. Though I have no record of it I think we went to pick up the suits from the Moss Bros just beneath the hotel, fortunately finding that they were all there and were what we'd asked for, though some creative labelling initially made it look like there were two suits for Ralph's brother and none for him. I think we then took them to the wedding-venue and dumped them (whilst Nicky and Edgar slept) before I walked back, had a quick look around, popped back into the hotel then popped back out again to try and find somewhere to buy some food, eventually finding the pastie-vending shop I'd seen earlier and a Lidl from which a carton of our favourite multivitamin-flavour fruit-effect juice was bought. We then settled down for a night of trying to sleep through the usual unpleasant heat of a hotel room and Edgar occasionally scratching at the diamond-weave-mesh sides of the travelcot.