Day 6 - Goodbye money

Ah London, what a magnificent city to haemorrhage money in. Today was brilliant, but eye-wateringly expensive. We began by walking though Hyde Park to Kensington Palace for morning tea, which had to be a Victoria sponge, and made our way through the park from there to Diana's memorial fountain towards Kensington. The reason for heading to Kensington was that we managed to get a booking at Heston's two Michelin star restaurant, Dinner. For two and a half hours on a weekday there is a set lunch menu which is expensive, but not prohibitively so, and we were able to get a table.

The food was exceptional, and also a little odd, as you might expect. As it's a set menu, there are only two choices for each course, so we just asked that they bring us one of each, and we swapped plates (discreetly-ish) halfway through each dish. I never thought I'd eat jellied pigs ear, but I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed it! The staff were thoroughly attentive, and we both had one glass of wine, from a thoroughly intimidating wine list that was over 40 pages long, with bottles over $4000 regularly peppered throughout. We each had a glass of the cheapest wine on the menu.

Lunch took around two hours, so we had quite some time to fill before our evening show, so we finally got to explore Harrods. What a ridiculous, opulent, altogether over the top place! It's fun to wander around and gaze at the displays and sheer level of opulence, but there is very little that's in the realm of even a semblance of affordability. There was a child's play house that was twenty thousand pounds! We wandered around most floors a little, and then made our way to H&M, a much more reasonable prospect.

We did a little shopping, and then explored Foyle's, a famous London bookstore, where I was delighted to pick up a first edition signed copy of Atwood's The Heart Goes Last, her new novel. By this stage we needed to get to Soho for our West End show, Miracle by Derren Brown. Our original seats in the beautiful Palace theatre were in the nose bleed section, but they were offering upgrades, so we paid a little more to get better seats in the stalls as we couldn't see some of the stage in our original ones. The show was fantastic, and it was brilliant to be able to see someone we've seen countless times on television 'work his magic' in the flesh, as we both never thought that we'd get the opportunity.

Soho and the West End late at night is very different to early evening, so rather than mill about, we decided to make our way back to our hotel in anticipation of seeing The Force Awakens tomorrow morning. 'Till next time, may the force be with you!

-Jess

Harrod's was a like a fancier David Jones, which has it's own brand that I couldn't care less about. They charge $50 for an empty shopping bag with their logo on it. What the actual?

We also saw (from a distance) the Star Wars premier here in London. There were police stopping plebs from going anywhere near the theatre so we saw nothing.

 - Andrew