Spending the weekend in London

It was a lovely weekend and we decided to make the most of the fine weather and take the Clipper Boat up the Thames from Canary Wharf. We had originally planned to travel up to town on the Dock Lands Light Railway (DLR) but engineering works meant that great chunks of the system were closed last weekend and we didn't fancy fighting our way onto one of the replacement buses and sitting (or probably standing) for hours in a traffic jam.

We set off quite early planning to go up to Green Park but when we arrived at Tower Bridge we thought, what the hell it's been years since we've been here, let's hop off and grab a coffee by the river and sit in the sunshine people watching - god how I love people watching. I can spend hours just sitting and watching the tourists and making up little stories about them, I kid you not, they all have a story. For example; see that pretty young girl over at the postcards, well she came away with her boyfriend but they had a terrible row because he got very drunk last night. The poor girl is heartbroken, she was expecting a romantic lunch with the man of her dreams but instead she's on her own and her boyfriend has spent all morning in bed with the world's worst hangover - and see that 25 year old teetering along the cobbles in her Jimmy Choos, the one with the blond hair extensions and the expensive St Tropez tan, is she really with that middle aged bald bloke for his sparkling wit and personality?

But rather than drive Dave nuts with my rabbiting, we finished our coffee and set off over Tower Bridge to look at the Mayor's River Festival on the south bank. Not that we knew it was the River Festival, all we could see was a load of marquees set up outside the Council Offices and it looked like there was something going on!

It was good fun in a hippy dippy kind of way - lots of people out to save the planet and sell you trinkets from Peru and food stalls selling Argentinian Beef and Jamaican curry but the best fun was the army of Greenpeace activists who with incredible politeness were trying their best to get new recruits. Even our protestations of penury didn't deter one young bloke who offered us such a fabulous deal on the subscription we would have been mad to turn him down - mad and proud of it, that's us - the next time I'm asked what's the one thing that you are particularity proud of I shall say I didn't give in to Greenpeace - even though they had pulled out all the stops to put their cutest people on the streets.