bed & breakfast & activities

03.08.07 - 05.08.07

[excerpted from the mangat guide to english inns]

J's & M's Ye Olde Englishe Inn-it?

service par excellence. at j's & m's ye olde englishe inn, every guest is given special, pulitzer-academy-grammy-nobel-prize winning, treatment. the rooms are laid out with all necessary amenities and special touches: clean towels (bath + face cloth) (no b.y.o.t. here), comfy terry robes, scritchy-scratchy (colourful local parle for sponge-y bath thingy (for improved lather-ation in the shower (yours to keep!)), laundry basket (with three compartments for easy sorting), a map/guide book to public transit & a prepaid mobile phone. bed turn down service and back scratches upon request. immediately upon entering the inn, you will be offered a refreshment: various types of bevvies are available (including pomegranate juice), and your correspondent opted for a hearty stout.

after hopping in the shower to pep myself up (and availing myself of a number of beauty products available in the washroom, including a laudable collection of exfoliants), i emerged from my room refreshed and dressed for dinner. the innkeeps had provided a delightful home-cooked mexican feast, with home-made guacamole far surpassing any other that has crossed the threshold of this reporter's lips. dinner was delicious and the company superb. dessert - a minty chocolate concoction bearing more than a passing resemblance to a drumstick - was offered. it was a delicious compliment to the spice-acity of dinner. post-dinner, the three of us had a bit of a tipple -- dirty dirty triple-x dirty martinis, j-style. made to perfection.

after dinner and conversation, i retired to my room. the room is well-appointed, simply furnished and tastefully decorated. the theme strikes me as vaguely japanese. in my absence from the room, a carafe & cup for water had been placed on the bed-side table. it's lovely little touches like this that make j's & m's the kind of place that one returns to time and time again. i had been told at dinner that the inn offers laundry service and that guests can also be referred to a dry-cleaner in the neighbourhood. j & m offer guests as much privacy as sought and seeing that i had no firm plans for the morning, offered to show me to the local exercise facility, only a few minutes walk from the inn. among the activities offered there is pilates & i signed up for the morning session.

ah blessed sleep.

ah sweet morning.

my hosts provided breakfast (well definitely for the first morning of my visit & maybe even for the second). actually, they also provided lunch. but more on that. yummy TOAST w/ lemon curd on one piece & strawberry jam on the other. post-breakkie, we headed out to pilates, which is down the street. J & M live in blackheath/greenwich SE of london/SE london (i'm not sure how best described). and they live near gorgeous greenwich park. we walked past the park on the way to pilates. the class was pretty tough. lessons learned: 1) my career as a gymnast is officially over. 2) my hamstrings, hips & lower back are unbelievably tight & inflexible. 3) even if there are layers of blubber on your body, there still are muscles underneath it all, and mine are suffocating. 4) really flexible people annoy me. all in all, class was good. it made me feel like i have started to make-up exercise-wise for all the eating i'm doing.

post-pilates, we walked into the arches area, where there is a weekly market on saturdays. J had bought an awesome zipper bag there and i wanted to get one too because i am a copier-catter. so we wandered around the market. i made a few purchases, including a zipper bag (different from J's.) we had stopped in at an organic coffee shop to get some caffeination while we walked around the market stalls. we returned for lunch, since the food looked really yummy. and it was. i ate absolutely everything on my plate. that's rare. unless french fries are involved. then eating is a false expression - it's really more like inhaling.

[i just smooshed a bug on my laptop screen. a moment of silence, please.]

we walked back to J's & M's through greenwich park, which is a very lovely, huge park. it is one of the royal parks of london & the first to be walled in (in 1433). it used to be a former hunting park -- poor deer! and it's a whooping 183 acres big. there is still a smaller enclosed area for deer. the deer are cute: fallow deer & red deer are the two types of deer they mentioned on the sign telling me about the deer. cute. another notable notable about the park is the statue of james wolfe, a gift from canadians circa 1930. if james wolfe hadn't defeated the french in the pivotal battle on the plains of abraham (known in some circles as the battle on the hills of abraham or the battle for quebec), then i would speak french fluently & practice law in montreal. though i wonder if my dad would have emigrated to "canada" (or whatever it would have been called) in the first place. anyway. in wolfe v. marquis de montcalm, wolfe won and now he presides over greenwich park, a hero. more on greenwich park later.

we got home and bummed around. showered. changed. J & M were invited to a birthday party for their friends' son, D, who turned 8 years old. the party was in greenwich park, which is conveniently located across the street from ye olde englishe inn. we packed up beverages & a blanket & cameras and walked over to the party. we ingratiated ourselves to the group by promptly picking up plates and serving ourselves all the yummy food they had. it was the perfect day for a picnic in the park: sunny, warm but not crazy humid-ass hot.

1 funny thing: while a game of soccer was going on in our group, J & I saw in the distance a little boy running with an obvious destination. he had what looked like possibly a diaper or a pair of underoos around his ankle & he was running & it was hilarious. J took a picture and we zoomed it up and it really did look like equal parts underwear (of the tighty-whitey variety) or a wayward diaper. poor kid. funny for us though.

while M was busy with the kids, J took me to go see the prime meridian passing through the royal greenwich observatory in the park. pretty cool! i took 100 pictures of it. & of the greenwich mean time clock. also really neat. the views of london from the vantage point of the observatory are great. J showed me where she works, and we saw the "gherkin" - a pickle-looking building which actually looks like a phallus. and the O2 - formerly, the millennium dome, now a large entertainment complex. actually very cool looking in a futuristic sort of way. the gift shop at the observatory is a must-do. i am very happy with my postcards, pencils & especially this cool prime meridian t-shirt i bought. yes yes. the trappings of tourism, i fall right into them.

we came back to the party site and lounged around for a while longer. everyone was super friendly and nice. & the cake was yummy. D's dad, B, used to play soccer semi-professionally and it showed, not the semi part, the professional part. & M showed off his moves too. basically, it was nice to be around normal people. somehow J & M have perpetrated a fraud on these nice people, fooling them into thinking that they're "normal" too, or at least normal enough. i love J & M.

back home, we did intend to go back out again. but i fell asleep and J & M were also just kicking around. by the time i got up and ambled into the living room it was around 9 pm. & we decided to order in pizza. we ate yummy pizza, hot chocolate & watched a program on british romance films through the ages. or at least some of them. i thought it was interesting. J & M have only 5 channels but they make up for it with wi-fi. anyway, we switched between that and law & order: svu. until i finally conceded that i'm geriatric and needed to call it a night.

g'night me.

oh, i wanted to tell you about "the story of tracy beaker" -- a tv show that aired here from 2002-2005, which airs in syndication (maybe?). it's about kids who grow up in a group home and comes from the perspective of one of the kids, tracy beaker. the children's home is affectionately called "the dumping ground" - anyway, i think it's a very cool concept for a children's program, to show that there are different family-structures. & J is a social worker who works in post-adoption - & it's cool to hear her insights into the system for adoption here.