back to life

I love my trips to London and there are several posts on this blog to support this. My last two visits to the Big Smoke involved two music legends and my two sons.

Back in August I met son number one, Scott, at Paddington station and we made our way to Sotheby’s to see the exhibition of Freddie Mercury’s possessions “A world of his own”. Fans and buyers could visit to view the items for a couple of weeks before the auctions arranged and managed by Mary Austin, Freddie’s lifelong friend whom he described as his common law wife and was his closest confidant. During that time there were 140,000 visitors from all around the world and the auctions raised £40 million, a large proportion of that amount was donated to charity.

Freddie collected a lot of fabulous stuff in his short life and 14061 lots were lovingly arranged over three floors and each room had vases full of beautiful lilies to fill the air with the most amazing fragrance. Everything was in temptingly close touching distance and while no-one was looking I managed a little pinch on the bottom of the sleeve of a jacket Freddie wore on a visit to Japan. When I mentioned it to Scott, he shot me a look that said “if we get chucked out of here because of you, I’m going to kill you”! It reminded me of the time myself and both my lads went to Destination Star Trek and I was trying to get a sneaky photo of William Shatner instead of paying the extortionate fee to do so. I was told a couple of times to stop and move along, which I ignored and my youngest son, Jake, felt the need to drag me away hissing “you’re gonna get us chucked out”.

So with that in mind I decided to try and behave myself on my next trip to London with Jake to see the Elvis Exhibition. It was a wonderful collection of memorabilia from Graceland, lots of amazing personal items belonging to Elvis, stage outfits, documents, vehicles, instruments and his every day clothes in all their 1970’s glory. This time there was no chance of touching anything as it was all safely protected behind glass.

It was a relatively small exhibition so before we headed home we made our way to St. John’s wood and after a yummy lunch at the Drunch café we wandered to the Abbey road studio. We really didn’t have time to do the studio tour, so we visited the shop and tried to get a “walking across the zebra” photo without pissing off too many motorists!

I am so lucky to have shared interests with my lads, it makes my days out to London really special.