You can almost smell the swarveness.
The tie clip in question is this beautiful piece of male jewellery which my darling, and long suffering wife bought for my birthday the other week. I think it adds a certain “man about town” swarveness to my appearance which only one as finely moustachioed and I can carry off. Lisa on the other hand seems to think that I’d nicked a paper clip from work and was using it in a vain attempt to keep my tie from flying away, but there again this is a woman who actually wants to get rid of her “thigh gap” so what can she possibly know about looking good.
What she does know though is that the appalling Slug & Lettuce downstairs serves two-for-one cocktails at half five of an evening which is a much better place to wait for Spikey Haired Ed to finally finish work than hanging around the office’s cash machine like a load of delinquent teenagers.
Mickey seems to find Lisa's paper-clip jokes quite funny.....
So after the two-for-one cocktails were finished, or in the case of Natasha and Kevin, the four-for-two cocktails were finished, (and my insipid pint of Amstel) we wandered back to the offices to pick up Ed only to find his time keeping was as good as ever and he was nowhere to be seen. The rest of the tour set off for the short walk to Leadenhall Market, although by the way some of them were whinging about the less than 1 mile walk you’d think I’d asked them to hike the length of Hadrian’s Wall. I hung around like the world’s most unattractive rent boy and then gave up on the king of hair wax and marched off myself.
The bright lights of Leadenhall Market.
So as I make the 15 minute trip to Leadenhall Market I’d better explain what this week’s tour was all about and who had made it out for the evening. This week’s church was St Peter upon Cornhill which is located in the middle of a concrete jungle of office blocks and is only approachable through a rabbit warren of narrow alleyways. The church is just over the road from the well-known and previously mentioned Leadenhall Market which seems to crop up in nearly every film that features a scene in London. What Leadenhall Market does have, apart from filmability, is a few pubs dotted around its interior and it was to two of these that we planned to kick our evening off with.
Young's Lamb Tavern.
The first was Young’s Lamb Tavern and it was there that I met back up with Mickey, Munchkin Steve and the rest of the Payroll reprobates; Natasha, Kevin, Lisa and Pissed-Up Phil. Also meeting us there was Gemma fresh back from the arse-end of the world and accompanied by her non-boyfriend, a fine figure of a man called Sam. The final pieces of the jigsaw were Mr Clark, bravely coming back to the tour without Mr Cheeseman and only moments behind my arrival a flustered looking Spikey Haired Ed.
The Lamb Tavern is a lovely “ye olde world pub” which is well worth a visit especially as Young’s are also giving away free drink vouchers, many thanks to the eagle eyed Munchkin Steve for spotting these. The vouchers aren’t as good as the Fuller’s ones because the drinks range is limited but a free pint of Young’s Bitter should never be rejected. The pub is well known for the wrought iron spiral staircase, etched glass and the tiled mural of Sir Christopher Wren presenting his plans for the Monument to the Great Fire of London (hidden behind the door) is so good I forced everyone to take a look.
Lisa's paper-clip jokes as viewed through a pint of Young's Bitter.
It was here that Lisa launched here attack on my tie clip much to her own amusement. Admittedly my defence wasn’t too great; I tried to liken my tie-clip looking like a paper-clip to her bag looking like a bag and of course attacking a woman’s bag is tantamount to violent incest so this didn’t win me any points or favours. Luckily for the rest of the tour Lisa is more or less completely off her noggin on prescription drugs at the moment so mixing these with alcohol isn’t the best idea in the world. Showing a very old head on very young shoulders she decided to leave for home after the Lamb and so the tour was much quieter but all the more duller for her departure.
Morland Original. Exactly what it says on the clip.
As previously mentioned the next pub was at the other end of the market, this time a Greene King pub called The New Moon. Here we didn’t have any vouchers but we did get a very nice pint of Morland’s Original, well for me and Mr Clarke at least. We escaped the crush of the bar and the hordes of people who had decided to watch the Clegg vs Farage debate in the pub (Really?) and it was here that the final tourist of the night arrived and heralded a huge turning point in the life of the housewives answer to George Clooney. Spikey Haired Ed has, and this will come as a huge surprise to regular readers of the blog and a huge disappointment to the legion of teenage Jackie readers, been in a relationship for the past 18 months in one of the worst kept secrets ever. In an attempt to “go public” he brought along the delightful and minute Reena to savour the pleasures of the tour.
So once this shock was gotten over and once Gemma and Natasha had gagged down their delightful halves of Greene King Yardbird we moved on, which was just a case of crossing of Gracechurch Street and into what I understand to be the largest Wetherspoons in the country, The Crosse Keys. Many of us have been in this monstrous place before but we’ve never covered it on one of our tours and it’s well worth a visit just to take in the impressive size and extremely well done conversion that Wetherspoon’s did to turn this former bank into a very nice pub.
The beer range is extensive and the downside to this is that it’s difficult to see exactly what is on offer with the handpumps circled around the central bar. The flat screens which are used during beer festivals were all off so it was a bit of a case of ordering what could be seen directly in front of you. In an attempt to go for something different I plumped for pints of Köstritzer Black Lager which although extremely nice, at £4.75 a pint must be one of the most expensive pints in a Wetherspoon’s ever.
For some reason we clustered around the stairs to the toilets to shoot the breeze. Unfortunately between myself and Spikey Haired Ed the most interesting thing we can remember from this time was an umbrella falling on the floor. Hey, that’s the crazy life we lead!
When I had researched the pubs I’d discovered a “short cut” leading from the church to the back door of the Crosse Keys so led the troops out of the this exit for the short spin around the corner directly into the church yard. Of course I’d forgotten how like herding cats it is to try to get this unruly mob into any sort of order and needless to say by the time we’d covered the 10 yards or so, we’d lost half the people somewhere on route.
St Peter keeps a look out for the missing tourists.
Not wanting to make them all hang around like spare chimps at a tea party I did the church talk once only to have the lost souls finally appear at the end of the speech and so had to do the whole thing again. Luckily the talk was one of the shorter ones. St Peter upon Cornhill was a return to a Christopher Wren built church (see there was a reason I wanted you to see the tiles!) being another one which was destroyed in the Great Fire of London and then rebuilt shortly afterwards. It is currently not used for regular services but is an addition to nearby St Helens (to be covered in a later episode) and is used for study groups and youth clubs. It is, apparently, built on the highest point within the City of London and is mentioned by Dickens in his novel “Our Mutual Friend”……..is that enough? Right let’s get a drink.
Rumours that St Peter is the patron saint of basketball are get to be confirmed.
One of the nicest things about St Peter’s is that not only does it back onto the Crosse Keys but it also backs onto the final pub, another Fuller’s emporium (vouchers at the ready everyone) called The Counting House. This gorgeous place of glass and brass had many confused between this place and the Old Bank of England (covered in the Monopoly visit to Fleet Street) and seeing as they were both built in former banks.
The ceiling in The Counting House.
I got the vouchered round in for Mr Clark, Ed, the future Mrs Ed and a couple of others and although the effeminate Latino barman was all smiles and winks I’m sure he miscalculated one of the vouchers and we still ended up paying a tenner for one drink and some crisps. Still a pint of Fuller’s ESB for next to nothing is still a delight.
Mr Clark looking impressed at Phil's conversation techniques.
The final episodes of the evening before the tube journey with Mr Clark, apart from watching Pissed-Up Phil descend into a blathering mess of double gins and inappropriate sexual innuendoes were spotting Stretch Arm-Max, former colleague and one time Monopoly Tourist last seen somewhere around the environs of Liverpool Street Station. I was then subjected to thousands of Gemma’s holiday photos which were only broken up by snaps of her nephew and the most beautiful fringe in the southern hemisphere.
And on that dreamy note…………we’ll sign off. Cheers!
The dangers of the selfie.
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