Reversing down Memory Lane..........

Last week I had some annual leave, which was nice.

I eschewed the bucket flight to Sharm-El-Sheik in favour of a "staycation" aboard.

(Jackie's working again anyway, and even if she wasn't, who would look after Thomas Cat?)

Also, we're skint........

I did manage a couple of trips into London, though.

The first involved supper and a night's stay with our chums Claire and Andy.

After booze-ban Jan, a torrent of wine was unleashed, so it was with a low-to-medium-level hangover that I left their place the following day.

(Incidentally, the high-level hangover is of the sort that precludes not only any semblance of sentience, but getting up at all....for several days. The scale stops there, because if you aren't actually dead, you really, really really wish you were....)

Jackie had preceded me into town to get to work, so I tottered from Waterloo station in the vague direction of Soho at about 10.30. (I'd arranged to meet my old pal Ellis for lunch at The French Pub.)

On the way, I took in the National Film Theatre.

Ellis and I used to work there in the '90's when it was home to the late, great, gone, but never-to-be-forgotten Museum of the Moving Image.

Memory Lane?

More like a six-lane highway........

Ah!

The work!

The nights of drinking and carousing!

The great friends!

The mortal enemies!!

The time of our lives!!!

Gone.

All gone.

Not a vestige of that once wonderful place now remains.

Walking around the NFT was actually disorientating. So much was familiar, but so much was simply....... missing. Perhaps it was the hangover, but I felt almost ill, like I was suffering from vertigo.

They say you should never return to a place where you have been happy.....

I crossed Waterloo Bridge and headed slowly up into The West End.

I had an excellent lunch with Ellis at The French: we talked of anything and everything.

Except the past.

That we left where it is, back-aways down the winding road.

No matter how much you might wish to, you simply cannot reverse down Memory Lane.