A Tea-Cup Sized Trip

So this year, Charlie-boy decided it would be a good idea to hold his coronation on my birthday.

Now don’t get me wrong - I’m all for having my birthday being a national holiday and giving it the bank holiday it deserves. This just wasn’t the reason I was hoping for. And rudely, I wasn’t even given an invitation.

I decided to go anyways.

Not to the coronation. I didn’t fancy having to deal with the met police.

But I wanted to be there amongst the pomp and circumstance and the party on my birthday.

The only problem was that I am an extreme introvert who hates crowds.

Enter Heather.

My dear friend who came all the way from the Carolinas of America to join me in this pocket-sized side quest.

With someone there that I knew, the journey and insanity of London during a coronation seemed way less daunting.

We arrived in the early afternoon of the 5th and left later afternoon on the 7th.

Obviously, we would be doing coronation things on my birthday… but that still left us a good amount of time to fill on the other non-coronation days.

Despite there being dozens, if not hundreds, of things to do in London, this was far from an easy thing to plan.

Many of the traditional locations would be shut or have reduced hours for the holiday. Also, both Heather and I had gone to school in London and had seen many of the sights several times each.

So what to do?

How to fill the time?

This is what the internet was made for.

A quick search presented a long list of weird and wonderful, often forgotten sights in and around London.

My favourite was a rock.

It’s formally called “the London Stone”, and it sits in a fancy house with a glass viewing window.

It’s absurd, and I love it.

It’s my new favourite London attraction.

Why?

Because it’s the most English thing I’ve ever encountered.

No one knows what it is (though there are many, many theories), and no one could give me a concrete reason why the rock - which in every theory I saw had spent centuries outside exposed to the elements - needed a house in the first place. But the house was built, then moved, then rebuilt because it needed to be moved two more times. A hilarious TikToker postured that the only reason it has a house is because it had a house before. Generations of English people building a rock a house because that’s what the generation before did. And the rock has to be important because why else would it have a house.

Most. English. Thing. Ever.

So that was day one.

We didn’t just go to see a rock in a house. We also saw a Banksy near our hotel, did a spot of shopping for some fun jewellery to wear to the coronation, which I still hadn’t received my invite for, and went to the most lavishly decorated pub in all of London, which was completely decked out for the coronation. But the rock was the best bit.

The next day was the coronation, and we stood in torrential rain in ball gowns and tiaras, watching Charlie-Boy get the crown he had so patiently waited for.

There was trifle for my birthday cake (see previous post for pics).

Then a lot of lying around to recover from waking up at dawn in order to get a place to stand and get soaked in the field while we watched the coronation.

The next day we split up.

I went for a lovely walk to the bells of St. Pauls, grabbed some coronation-themed doughnuts, and meandered across the millennium bridge. There was a lovely spot for mud larking in front of the Tate Modern, which distracted me, so I had to speed-run the museum before I walked back to the hotel to checkout.

There was a short tangent to my journey to the return train, where I rode the Elizabeth line. I was excited to ride it as it wasn’t around when I was in uni there.

The trip was topped off with a quick trip to Fortum and Masons to grab a souvenir tin of biscuits then it was a train ride home.

A perfect tea-cup-sized trip and a brilliant birthday.