London Spring 2025

 I have been finding recently that I am waking up pretty early everyday. That'll probably change as I being to take anti-histamines. The trees are just beginning to flower, although it has been quite cold recently which has probably slowed Spring down a little bit. I was awake from around 7am, but as there was a new parkrun nearby to the hotel, I didn't actually start to leave until 8am. The new parkrun is at Battersea park which is about a mile south from the hotel on the other side of the Thames. I had actually been past this park last time I was at the hotel, when I had run to the other nearby parkrun at Clapham Common. It was slightly chilly but still very nice in the early morning sunshine. As expected, the parkrun was very busy. I arrived at the finish area about 8:45 and they were already doing the briefing. They then attempted to sort us by finish time and walk us to the start. I just ducked out and waiting close to the front, about 100 back. The start was a bit furious...

This is our re-arranged trip following my accident in December. We were supposed to go for an overnight stay before Christmas on the weekend before Christmas (Christmas was a Monday last year). The timings of everything actually ended up perfectly this visit. We got up at 7am and were ready by 8am. Annoyingly it was raining very lightly, but it was scheduled to stop as soon as we left. Kathryn grabbed the umbrella as we left, but actually didn't use it. We had plenty of time before our train to London. So we were able to get coffee from Pret and I even had time to make a hasty trip to Laynes to get some chocolate spice cake and a postchia bun. The train arrived on time and we got our seat. We have started going standard class as the new Azuma trains are pretty decent even in standard, and the first class isn't that much better; but it is a lot more expensive. We had our breakfast and gradually the sun came out as we got closer to London. The transfer to the hotel was uneventful...