It’s midday Christmas Eve and I am sitting in a bar faced with a plate of bangers and mash, mushy peas, lots of gravy and a pint of cider. There is the soft murmur of English spoken word around the room with the occasional outburst from the resident drunk who seems to have got a very healthy head start on everyone else in the room. He is showing no signs of abating, and seems to have his mind set on sampling each of the plethora of beers on the wall behind the bar. From the looks he is receiving from the other patrons, I suspect that he isn’t from around here and is displaying unacceptable bad form, well at least for this time of the day.
The TV on the wall is predicting more snow, but on what we have experienced so far we know better than to trust this entirely. You would think that with several thousand years of occupation in this part of the world, they would have become pretty good at this weather forecasting thing … they haven’t. Either that or they just like to keep us on our toes.
The pokey machines across the room are flashing out of time with the abundance of Christmas lights that are shrouding the streets outside. Streets that would definitely benefit from a romantic dusting of the white stuff. Instead we are treated to the sight of myriads of people trudging past in the couple of inches of muddy, slushy remnants of the snow of a few days ago.
Looking out the window, we sometimes think that this could be anywhere in the world, this could be home in NZ, people bustling around doing their last minute Christmas shopping. The damp, grey sky could be a classic winters day in NZ. However on closer inspection this could really be no other place. The accents in the pub cover the gamut of the English speaking peoples of the world, the buildings outside were built long before NZ was conceived as a likely antipodean destination, the buildings are fronted by wrought iron and the pubs that line the streets have names that include Fox, Hound, Rose, Crown, … in any imaginable combination and variant.
The people here seem less concerned with fashion than we have seen elsewhere in Europe and appear to be more concerned with the practical aspects of beating the weather into submission within the confines of their jackets, coats, boots, gloves and scarves. The predominant colour is black, only to be interrupted by the colours of fur. Of course there are regular exceptions to this rule, where there seems to be an alarming number of short skirts and bare legs, complete with the purple goosebumps to complete the fashion statement.
The black cabs, bright red double decker buses and the quintessential bobbies in their round helmets and reflector gear complete the picture. This really could be nowhere else in the world. This is London.
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