Kishore Singh: Down and Out on the London list

It wasn't that I was cheating on my wife, just a case of wanting to do something that didn't involve museums and galleries, of which London seemed to suffer a surfeit. Back in Delhi, my son and I had been given a list of places to visit and now looking at it in Soho, I had to admit that the sights we'd managed so far seemed rather less than more. So, when the phone rang, instead of confessing that we were sitting at a pub overlooking - this was not by choice - a sex shop, I postured that we were in standing distance of Buckingham Palace. "What's the noise?" my wife asked suspiciously. "It's tourists," I volunteered, "having themselves a picnic" - which, you'll admit, wasn't far wrong.
 

It had been this way for a week. My son wanted to go shopping, she insisted he "do the sights". We managed the V&A, but she was unhappy we'd quit on the Tower of London; we took pictures of Ranjit Singh's golden throne, she griped we hadn't paid homage to the Kohinoor. Directing the taxi driver to slow down before Westminster, we assured her we'd done the Abbey. When Trafalgar Square proved too cold to circumambulate, we entered the National Gallery but shed our halos to walk out because my son complained there were "too many pictures".

We'd been directed to see the Wallace Collection but a pub named Waxy's Little Sister in Piccadilly offered a cosier alternative. Charles Dickens' museum was less attractive than Regent Street, and beer from a keg in Cafe Rouge seemed infinitely more potent than a shot of history. "Where are you now?" my wife's call interrupted our late lunch. "At Tate Modern," I volunteered, "the Paul Klee exhibition is fascinating," having previously taken care to read the posters at the tube station.

It wasn't all sightseeing too. She wanted us to track down a street vendor in Portobello called Belinda who had previously sold her a pair of heels with a dodgy buckle. We were to give Belinda a piece of my wife's mind and ask for a replacement. My son charged a new pair of boots to his account and extracted a promise I wouldn't spill the beans on his sleight of hand. She wanted lint rollers from Sainsbury's (out of stock), marmalade from Harrods (available, fortuitously, at the airport) and a photograph of Hamley's toy shop (which my son took off the internet). We were to walk in Hyde Park (we drove through, instead), take the London Eye ("Why?" my son protested righteously, "I'm not a kid"), and watch at least one Broadway show (we tried, honest, but what with catching the bartender's eye and jostling the crowds to get a drink, it was too late one evening, too cold the next, and then, well, one forgets, right?).

"What're you eating?" she'd ask. The right answer was haddock and chips, or shepherd's pie, or steak and kidney, which would be a waste of foreign exchange when there was Zuma's inspired cuisine for a stylish tuck-in, or simply quarter-pounders on the run. "Make sure you carry an apple from the breakfast table," she advised, which would have been fine if we'd woken early enough to make the buffet. "Drink lots of liquids," she insisted, on which count we were able to assure her of our bonafide intentions, and under the influence of which we made sure to tick off her entire list while entering, at my son's insistence, into a conspiracy of silence.