Companions in London

Walking in Hyde Park on Wednesday, I met these Greylag Geese waddling in a line towards me.

Their gait reminded me of the geese in the Disney cartoon “The AristoCats”: English twins called Abigail and Amelia Gabble, on a waddling tour through France.

I deny totally any similarities between the Gabble twins and these two lovely lady bloggers lunching in Covent Garden on Tuesday.

The blogger on the left, gabbling about life in London, is me.   On the right is Carissa, who gabbles regularly about life in India on her blog called “Everyday Adventures in Asia (mostly)”.

Carissa was passing through London on her way from Canada to India, and I’m so pleased that we met in real life, after a few years of reading each other’s blogs.  Does the photo show that we’d been having fun? I hope so.

If you want to read more about Carissa’s international life, from Winnipeg to Mumbai via Jakarta and other places, click here.

I’ll be back tomorrow with some more London images.

 

 

 

Mews: All Porsches, or still some Horses?

Does anyone still ride horses in London?  A good place to check would be Bayswater.  It’s very close to Hyde Park.  Not just driving or cycling distance – it’s within trotting distance.  And this sign in Sussex Square looks pretty hopeful.

Despite what I said in my blog posts from March about mews being transformed into garaging for cars, some horses still live in Bathurst Mews.  You can arrange rides and lessons in Hyde Park from two stables in the mews – Ross Nye Stables and Hyde Park Stables.

I’ve no idea which of the two stables is better, but at least one of the horses from Hyde Park Stables has a glowing golden tail.

London in Autumn (Year Two)

Last October I took some photos of the autumn colours (fall colors) in Regent’s Park.  Before you read that post again, let’s see if West London can beat it.

I found those sycamore leaves in Hyde Park last week.  It’s a bit deceptive, because only a few leaves had turned; most of the leaves on the trees were still green.   Porchester Square was the same – as I could see through the railings.

The horse chestnuts in the park had already produced their seeds – conkers.

I wanted to keep some conkers to take home, but I had some tough, and hungry, competition.

Bleeding London: Bayswater

I didn’t meet the man from whom my husband and I bought our Marylebone maisonette.  When we moved here in the nineties, the vendor had already moved out, to a house in Bayswater.  For a few years we forwarded mail to his new address in Hyde Park Gardens Mews.  Since then I’ve had a daft notion that it’s a natural progression to move from Marylebone to Bayswater.  So I enjoyed walking round that area for the Bleeding London photography project, choosing my potential new home.

I couldn’t decide whether I wanted my future to be grand or quaint.  This next one had a little of both.

The big attraction of Bayswater isn’t really the attractive buildings – it’s the proximity to Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, through the entrances on Bayswater Road.

I had an excuse for a stroll through the park, because the Bleeding London list of streets (based on the London A-Z) includes routes across the park, like North Ride (above, for horses) and West Carriage Drive (below, for vehicles).

I don’t think I will rush to move away from Marylebone.  Bayswater isn’t perfect, with its own share of abandoned shopping trolleys.  Although they do come from a higher class of supermarket.