Friday 22nd August 2025

I was up early again. This time I ran to the other nearby park which is Battersea Park.

It was a bit cooler this morning, much better for running in. I was doing parkrun tomorrow so didn’t want to do too much running. I went through a few little backstreets to look at the houses.

We popped over to Ottolenghi again to get cakes. We were thinking about getting lunch, and funnily enough there was a fire alarm going off and everyone was outside. When we did eventually get seated, we could have got breakfast/brunch, but opted not too.

We walked back to the hotel with all the cakes. I realised halfway back I left my musette a the cafe so had to go back for it.

Then at 3pm we went down to the cafe for the afternoon tea. Usually we have sat upstairs in the past, in the nice cafe bit, but it’s been rammed with families with it being summer holidays, and so we sat downstairs in the main restaurant. Thankfully we got a spot in the corned, and were largely by ourselves whilst we had the food. As always, it was really nice. Something to do every few years when they change the theme. But it is really expensive.

After food, we then went to the Oritental after missing out yesterday.

In a similar fashion to the afternoon tea, the drinks and experience has always been excellent, even exceptional at the Oriental.

It was quite nice as a few people had drinks whilst we were there, building the sense of Friday evening atmosphere. But actually we outstayed everyone and by the end we were there by ourselves.

I had a Negroni first, which I really am getting a flavour for. And then after that, one off their menu which was a bit like having a Caprhini, but lemon/citrus/orange flavour, instead of the usual lime.

After that, we came back to the room and watched

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Wednesday 20th August 2025

As the bank holiday approached, we were getting ready for our latest holiday. We last went away (to London again) in March (the delayed trip due to my broken arm). This time we planned to be in London at the bank holiday, which we felt worked really well after visiting last year for Simon & Steph’s wedding. Today we set off on our holiday for 2025, this time we chose to have an extended trip to London, which we’ve not done in a while. Recently we have just stayed for 1 night. We got a later train, so we got up pretty reasonable time around 7-ish and left at 8:30 to get the train to Leeds. We had about an hour to wait for our train to London, so we sat in Pret and had a coffee. I popped to Laynes to get some buns for the journey to London (and more coffee!). The journey was pretty uneventful. The train was pretty much fully booked, quite a few families on their holidays too. We played the bird game on our new iPad and that seemed to make the time go pretty quickly. Once in ...

Saturday 23rd August 2025

As usual with these trips, Saturday morning was allocated to do a local parkrun. I had spotted that there was one more event nearby that I could get to be running to the start. It was listed as a woodland and grass course that could get muddy in the wet, so I thought I better do it when it was dry so I could just wear road shoes. It was a bit of a pain to get to, as it required crossing a road and railway, but the new Strava feature for heat maps showed quite well the route that I should take. I left plenty of time to get to the start so I wasn’t stressing. In fact, in the end I arrived about 45 minutes before the start which was a bit too long. But I took a long walk around the park, and sat on a bench for a bit to pass the time. The initial route from the hotel involved going through Hyde Park and past Kensington Palace. There wasn’t too many crazy streets to take, I think it was more important to get to the route crossing. I did check the phone occasionally to keep on the right rout...

Thursday 21st August 2025

I rose early on Thursday, at 6:00am. I managed to drag myself out early to go for a run around the park. I found from being in NYC that I need to make the effort to get myself out on the first day, and then I’ll do it everyday. I tried to run around the interior and staying away from the edges where the busy roads are. It was warm, but surprisingly windy. I grabbed some coffees on the way back to the run. I got in about7:30am and Kathryn got up as we were going to the zoo. We ate some cake and leftover bun from yesterday. Ottolenghi had accidentally forgot to give us something so we only had 1 cake to eat. We got the tube to Embankment and then to Camden. It didn’t feel as long to get to as it took us last time, which surprisingly was over 10 years ago. It required a bit of a trip through London, using the Circle Line and then Northern Line to Camden. From there is was a short walk to Regent Park which is where the zoo is located. We had a slow wonder arou...

London Summer 2025

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