As per their tradition, Brian was up before everybody else the next morning and served coffees as people surfaced for the day, then cooked breakfast for all. We sat around the breakfast table for ages doing more catching up about our various histories before moving to the living room to continue more of the same until most of the morning had disappeared. It was time to pack up our stuff!
Doris suggested she would take us on a quick historic tour of Bury St Edmunds, roughly 20-30 minutes drive away on our route home. We said our fond farewells to Brian, who needed to stay home for another commitment, promising it would not be another thirteen years before we got together again.
It was good to have a tour guide as there is much to know about Bury. In the time of Henry XIII it was the size of London. It was important for its wool trade and the enormously large and important abbey. The abbey was robbed of its wealth and destroyed on Henry's orders. Today remnants of the walls and foundations are surrounded by a large and beautifully designed and maintained public park. We shared a farewell coffee with Doris and headed off to drive back to London to return our car and find our latest AirBnB in Southwark (suth-uck), just south of the Tate Modern gallery and a few blocks from London's tallest building The Shard. From our small two chairs and a table balcony on the sixth floor we had St Paul's Cathedral on the other side of the Thames just to the north of us, The Shard stretching skywards right in front of us, the tops of the towers of Tower Bridge visible over the buildings across the street, and the communication mast of Crystal Palace on the horizon to the south.
After settling into our new bright and airy flat, we took a sunny evening walk over Tower Bridge to eat at St Katherine's Dock, then walked back sat the daylight started to fade.
Posted with Blogsy
No comments:
Post a Comment