Pretending to be Rich in Liberty

My brother and his partner came to visit me on Wednesday. I journeyed up to St. Pancras to meet them off the train. On the DLR it was quite busy and there weren’t many places to sit. I ended up with my buttocks wedged into the corner of a seat trying not to fall into the aisle. It should have been perfectly feasible to sit normally except that the man in the window seat had decided to take manspreading to previously uncharted levels and was taking up one and three quarter seats all to himself and his cojones. Not content with taking two seats, he also had two phones, which he was busily tapping away on. Oscar tells me that this means he was probably a drug dealer. What he certainly was was an arsehole.

I was a little early, but that’s never a terrible thing at St. Pancras. There was a lady playing rag time piano to a small crowd of appreciative passers by. There was a father and son who looked so much like each other I expect the son experiences future shock every time he looks at his dad. There were a lot of inept suitcase wielders who were great to watch from a bench, not so great to navigate through when you’re on the move. I have plans to go to the champagne bar one day, but ten o’clock in the morning was not that day.

Rob’s train came in and we set off for a spin round Liberty. Sue, Robert’s partner is a needlewoman extraordinaire. She sews and knits and makes all kinds of amazing things. If you’re into fabric, Liberty is a treat. If you’re not into fabric, it’s still a treat. There were so many gorgeous bolts of cloth it was dizzying. The prices were also dizzying. Silks at £65 a metre and cottons at £28.

While we were window shopping there was a lady shopping shopping. She was buying fabric in four metre lengths and by the time we headed up to the Christmas shop to fondle expensive baubles, she had a five inch thick pile of material and it was still growing. There were two women cutting lengths of fabric for her at one point. It was impressive. I bought one, small panda patch for my dungarees for £3.99 and still managed to feel quite fancy. I nearly bought a dinosaur but went for the panda in the end because he had a shifty expression on his face and looked very much like he was up to no good.

When we had finished imagining what it would be like to be someone who could walk into a shop like that and buy whatever we wanted, we left for a wander before lunch. We mooched round Carnaby Street and Soho before grabbing dinner at a Brazilian restaurant on Shaftesbury Avenue where we added the meat sweats to regular weather related sweats.

We were going to go to Fortnums in the afternoon but it was so ludicrously hot we gave up being tourists and went back to the boat by way of my local ice cream parlour instead. We cranked the air conditioning up and spent the afternoon chatting and being grateful we had made wise choices and weren’t outside, boiling to death. The good thing about living here is that I can go to Fortnums any day I want and the good thing about having a sister who can do that is that you can go and visit her any day you like.