A different day in London now, and after doing some work at home in the morning I made my way to Covent Garden to meet up with my friend Simon, who I had not seen since his stag party a year and a half before, and who was visiting from Dublin for a couple of days. We met at the cafe of the London Transport Museum, I love going to their shop and I picked up a fantastic festive hat. I wish I had bought the matching scarf too, but instead I settled on the socks which I wore on Christmas Day. You don’t need to know that. We then popped into the Freemason’s Hall, which I had heard you could go into, and looked around at all the masons’ stuff. You can’t wear hats in there, so my new hat was not allowed, yet there were lots of other items of silly clothing on display. We felt a bit out of place. I don’t really understand all the Freemason stuff, the secret handshakes and whatnot, but it was interesting looking around at the museum, all the information about past famous members and all the trophies; we are a Spurs fan and a Newcastle fan respectively so the well stocked trophy cabinets made us feel a little awkward. We went and had a little bit of lunch and a Belgian beer at the Lowlander Cafe, before he had to go and meet up with his dad for some shopping (and I had to go and meet my dad for hospital visiting hours). Before I took the tube up to Barnet though I walked through Seven Dials (which I kept calling Nine Dials) and sketched the pretty scene with the golden-leaved trees. It was very nice, until about seven or eight of those bloody awful unlicensed rickshaws pulled up outside a theatre, presumably to catch people coming out of a show, and all started blaring ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba at the same time on their individual speakers. I say at the same time, they weren’t all in sync, so it was just an aural mess of Abba, completely ruining the xmas atmos. Each one of them was decked out in garishly pink frills, designed as if to say “we think you are stupid and will stupidly ride around on this stupid tricycle for stupid money”. I hate these things. If I were Mayor of London I would ban them, and anyone caught doing it would be forced to ride their tricycle all the way to Scotland, going on all the B roads and everything, and then ride around the hardest estate in Glasgow or somewhere, playing bloody Dancing Queen. They prey on tourists, I always read stories about people getting in them and then suddenly being charged 300 quid to ride from a hundred yards up the road by a threatening man with a frankly scary pink vehicle. And sure people might say, well they are part of London now, that’s just what you do, we’ve had pedicabs for ages and tourists want the loud colour and music and don’t mind paying for ten minutes of dodging traffic and pavements and pedestrians. Personally I think they’re awful ugly noisy things, and they ruin any charm Central London still has. You won’t see me in one any time soon. Bah humbug indeed.