Tag: London

London Calling: Part 3.

After eating we set off for a pub that is pretty famous among gamers; the Loading Bar. Various pinball machines lined the wall opposite the entrance and there were other classic arcade games scattered around the room. On the wall facing the bar was a TV linked to a PlayStation 4 and there was another corner stacked high with various board games. Even the cocktails had game-themed names such as Skyrum. We had arranged to meet up with some friends, primarily Jarred’s future best man for our wedding. We laughed and joked with each other, and I watched the others’ playing board games which I opted out of due to fatigue.

We decided to leave as the sky began to darken, catching a much cooler and quieter tube back to Green Park from Stratford. We changed onto the Piccadilly line to St Pancras, during which a woman entered the tube with a very friendly dog called Charles who licked my wheelchair while trying to lick my hand.

Once again I slept very well and was only woken when the alarm rang. We got dressed and packed our bags, checking out of the hotel a little after 9 am, before returning to the British Museum to see the exhibits we had missed before. The morning was another bright one but it was significantly cooler, and there was a distinctly Autumnal feel to the day.

When we arrived at the museum we were directed along a route that surpassed the inaccessible wheelchair ramps, which they were working to replace. It was particularly reassuring to know that the museum staff had recognised the inadequacy of their disabled support, and were actively trying to improve it.

On the third floor of the British Museum the mummies can be found. I was fascinated by the biochemical processes of mummification, and was particularly entranced by the ability of modern science to be able to determine the diseases suffered by some mummies simply by looking at their remains. As it turned out the state of their teeth enabled the diet of the Ancient Egyptians to be understood too. I was also amused to find a prosthetic toe found on a mummy, proving that disability has been a problem for many millennia.

Pros[hetic Toe

A few rooms further through housed the infamous Sutton Hoo helmet, one of only four of the delicate and probably ceremonial Anglo-Saxon helmets in existence, and then we came to the hall of clocks. We passed through the darkened room slowly, looking at the wide range of mechanisms used to track time throughout history, eventually arriving at a Sony digital alarm clock the like of which I had owned as a child. As we exited the room we came to a lovely view point of the museum, and it struck 11 am; there was a cacophony of chiming behind us much like the opening scene of Back to the Future.

British Museum.jpg

After exploring the Aztec and Enlightenment galleries on the main floor of the museum, we went to the old, slow lift to leave. Just as the lift arrived, a powered wheelchair pulled up alongside us. The man in it was exceedingly grateful when we pulled the manual wheelchair over as far as possible, giving him room to enter the lift beside us instead of waiting. I explained that I used a powered wheelchair myself most of the time and knew just how frustrating it could be. He smiled and thanked us again as the lift arrived at the disabled entrance, and we made our separate ways across London.

We wandered through the streets of North London, making a small detour to buy lunch to be eaten on the train, and arrived at King’s Cross in time for our train. We approached the disabled support desk with our paperwork and were invited into a quiet side room to wait for our porter. The quiet, calm room was extremely pleasant after the bustle of one of the busiest train stations in the UK and was designed specifically to help people who were anxious in crowds to unwind before the journey. The porter arrived as promised and we were helped onto the train well before we were due to leave, so we relaxed into our seats. As we tucked into our lunches the train began to roll slowly, and we were on the way back to Leeds. I fell asleep for a large portion of the journey, which was uneventful, and I was very happy to see a porter standing outside our carriage as we pulled into the train station in Leeds.

Train

London Calling: Part 2.

That evening I had a bath. The hotel was built over a set of tunnels, one for the trains in and out of London and one for the various tube lines running from St Pancras, the tube station attached to King’s Cross. As I submerged myself in the warm water a train ran underneath us and the water made a strange bubbling noise around me. Having not eaten Mexican food recently I was perplexed, and it took me a minute to figure out what the noise was.

Perhaps it was the fatigue from the long day, perhaps it was the alcohol, or perhaps it was the insanely comfortable bed, but that night I slept better than I had for months. Even the trains failed to wake me, and the rattling of their passing beneath us was strangely soothing. I didn’t wake until the alarm sounded at 8 am the next morning, and while eating breakfast I discussed various futile plans with Jarred for stealing the mattresses.

The morning was bright and sunny and after getting dressed, I leant against the window frame watching the trains rattle past until Jarred was also ready. We made our way to the nearest entrance to St Pancras, but the lift here had been closed without warning. Fortunately,at another entrance a different lift was available, and we went underground. We bought our tickets in the unbelievably stuffy ticket hall, and then hopped on the Piccadilly line to Green Park, which was the nearest accessible tube station to the Science Museum, our destination.

Tube

We went straight from the tube station to Green Park, and the fresh air was a welcome relief from the heated stuffiness of the underground tunnels. We had coffee at one of a small chain of coffee shops found in central London’s parks, and then made our way towards Buckingham palace.

Once Jarred had snapped the obligatory photo of me in front of the palace we made our way through Hyde Park, along the edge of the Serpentine. The day was warm and soon we shed our coats to hang them off the back of the wheelchair. About half way along the Serpentine we spotted a heron wading through the water, slow and graceful as if it were royalty.

Eventually, we arrived at the Science Museum on exhibition road, adjacent to the Natural History Museum. Here, I met Jarred’s mother and little brother for the first time, and we went to the café in the museum to eat lunch together. Jarred’s sister, who worked at the Imperial College next door joined us for her lunch hour, and we sat together, laughing and joking as if we had known each other for years.

After this, Jarred’s sister returned to work, and the rest of us explored the Science Museum together. The space exhibition had life-size models of rocket engines, the moon-landing station, and even one of the surprisingly small Hubble telescope. Tim Peake even had an exhibition dedicated to him as the first Brit to enter the International Space Station, and the first Brit to undertake a spacewalk. The floor above housed an entire room dedicated to genetics and DNA, where I was able to answer a plethora questions from Jarred’s little brother, who is an aspiring scientist himself. I was in awe of the model built by Crick and Watson to discover the structure of DNA, one of the biggest and most important discoveries of the 20th century. Above this was the environment floor, and after this a floor dedicated to flight. This including model Spitfires, and even a model of the first machine ever to fly.

All too soon the afternoon came to an end, and we were saying goodbye to our family. The sun was still shining as we traveled back through Hyde Park and Green Park, returning to the tube station just as rush hour began to kick in.

Having bought an unlimited travel ticket for the whole day, we were able to bypass the ticket hall in Green Park tube station, instead going straight to the Jubilee line headed for Stratford. While the platform was crowded, we didn’t have to travel far to the raised platform for wheelchair access, and within a minute the strong breeze that announces the presence of a train far before you see or hear it rushed past us. The tube squealed to a halt and we were able to squeeze into the wheelchair space inside the carriage. Jarred clicked the wheelchair brakes on to prevent any inertia-related incidents, and then we were off, howling down the dark tunnels and stopping every few minutes. I felt a little like Katniss Everdeen headed to the Capitol of Panem, except I didn’t have to worry about a murdering contest at the end of the line.

At each stop more and more people climbed aboard the carriage. Soon every seat was taken, as was most of the standing room too. It was easy to identify the regular users of the tube; they were standing unaided in the carriage, looking at their phones or reading a book with their bags between their ankles, swaying gently with the motion. The heat of so many crammed into such a small place was overwhelming and I had to avoid several bags held on a level with my head, but I still had to wonder what all the fuss of the London Underground during rush hour was about, as I had faced far worse before.

Eventually, the train sped into daylight, and I was momentarily blinded after the darkness. Minutes later it came to a halt at the end of the line, Stratford. We left the tube and wandered over to Westfield, the humongous shopping centre over-looking the 2012 Olympic park, where we ate our evening meal.

London Calling: Part 1.

Just prior to midday on the 30th August Jarred and myself made our way down to the train station, a mere 10 minutes down a gentle slope surrounded by shops. I had borrowed my mother’s manual wheelchair which Jarred was pushing as I wasn’t confident that the trains could accommodate my powered wheelchair. We grabbed sandwiches from a café hidden just behind the doorway of the train station and sat in the waiting area looking at the departure board, waiting for the 1.15 pm to London King’s Cross (yes, that is the one featured in Harry Potter) to appear.

Half an hour before we were due to leave we went to the disabled support desk. When booking the train tickets we had also booked a porter and ramp in advance, and I had printed off the documentation to prove this. Once the documents were shown to the porters they happily escorted us to the train, and by 1 pm we were safely aboard. The only fly in the ointment was the woman who had a pram in the space reserved for wheelchairs, who not only refused to move (despite the notices and even the law giving wheelchair users priority to these spaces), but once I had claimed a nearby seat and the wheelchair had been folded up, fretted to Jarred that it would fall on her precious offspring. Her precious offspring then continued to cry all the way to Wakefield, where I was grateful to see them exit the train.

A little over half way through the journey, having drunk a 500 ml bottle of Coke Zero, certain needs made their presence felt. I waited until the next stop before getting up and hobbling the few metres to the bathroom. Unfortunately the train set off just as I was getting up again, and I very nearly ended up flat on the rather sticky floor. I managed to steady myself against the walls of the cabin and then made the short journey back to my window seat.

As I sat down Jarred began to laugh. Naturally assuming he was laughing at me for something stupid like having toilet paper stuck to my jeans (we’ve all been there), I glared at him. Then I realised that he was using his phone to track the progress of our train, and as it turned out, we were passing through the charmingly named “Bitchfield”.

Less than an hour later we pulled into Kings Cross, where a porter greeted us with a ramp almost as soon as the train had come to a halt. We made our way through the impressive train station, which in all seriousness has a dedicated Harry Potter shop, alongside a platform 9¾ complete with luggage rack entering the wall which fans spend hours queuing by just to get a photo of it.

We wandered out of the train station, from which our hotel could be seen. We crossed the insanely busy roads in the pouring rain, and were soaked by the time we reached the reception desk. The lovely receptionist offered us two key cards for our room, not just one, in case I wanted to venture out on my own. Given that I was relying on Jarred to push me everywhere this would have been pointless, but the unprejudiced gesture was very much appreciated anyway.

The room we had been given was perfect, with plenty of room to park the wheelchair, and a bathroom full of grab rails to help me move around. The beds were twin beds because in most cases a disabled person would be with a carer, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to share a bed. Fortunately the beds were pushed together, although on occasion one or the other of us disappeared down the gap between them.

Tired as we were, it seemed a shame to waste the remaining afternoon in our hotel room, and so we made our way to a nearby attraction you may have heard of; the British Museum. It was both free to enter and accessible, although the tent where bags were checked by security guards had wheelchair ramps that were, rather ironically, almost impossible to surpass in the wheelchair. Just inside the accessible entrance to the side of the museum there was an old lift. The first time the lift arrived for us, however, we couldn’t enter because a family of physically able-bodied people refused to budge one inch. The lift being old and slow, it was another 5 minutes before we finally got to enter the lift.

With only an hour or so before the museum closed, we didn’t have time to explore more than part of the Ancient Egyptian display. However, we still had plenty of time to find some impressive artefacts including the Rosetta stone, and this sheep-sphynx that reminded me of my favourite teddy, a sheep named Lamb-da.

Rambda

By 6 pm we had returned to the hotel, where we made hot drinks to warm ourselves through. After this, we made our way to the only accessible pub in the vicinity – Wetherspoon’s. Having travelled all the way to London, we ended up in a pub we have less than 10 minutes from our flat. One hotdog, millionaire sundae, and Strongbow Dark Fruits later, I was feeling very happy.