Lunch 33 storeys high

Lowry at the Tate Britain was the first of Margaret’s birthday treats. I hadn’t told her where we’d be going and when I said we were off to London for a surprise birthday treat, she thought that I had got tickets for the third day of the final Ashes test at the Oval.

That might have been a good present, but as it happened the cricket was awful - England struggled against tight bowling and I think the run rate was less than two an over. She had a lucky escape.

I’d also kept it a secret where we were having lunch and as we walked along Millbank to get the Jubilee line from Westminster to London Bridge, I remarked that I could see where we were going to have lunch.

I’d booked one of the three restaurants in the Shard, a Chinese called Hutong. The restaurant wasn’t at the top, but it was on the 33rd floor (about halfway up and certainly the highest meal I’ve eaten in London). The lift whips you up there in seconds and the restaurant complex makes full use of the views. There’s a cocktail bar looking down on Tower Bridge, The Thames and HMS Belfast; while Hutong offers views west, south and east.

We had a table right up against the glass facing west and north, so we could see the city, London Bridge Station, Borough Market and Southwark Cathedral. There was a particularly fine view of St Paul’s and, as the river bend round, the Millennium Wheel and Big Ben.

Southwark Cathedral below us and St Paul's across the river.

There’s so much to stare at that it’s actually quite hard to choose your food and settle down to eat it. The couple at the next table took more pictures than mouthfuls. They were from India, he was an architect, so he was very interested in the Shard and they came to London every year for their holidays.

The service and decor was first class, the views amazing and the food ... well the food was pretty standard Chinese, very nicely prepared and cooked, but still standard Chinese. We had dim-sum and spicy shredded chicken for a starter, followed by ribs, crispy beef, noodles and egg fried rice. With four glasses of wine, service and VAT it came to £110.

After the meal, I went to the loo for a wee. The toilets also had glass walls to the outside and the urinals were placed by the glass, so that you relieved yourself while enjoying the vista east and west (pissing all over Bermondsey).

Fancy a wee? Urinals at Hutong in the Shard.

Cricket and laser shows

Max and I with The Shard behind

I went to the Oval on Thursday night with Tom, Sam, Lucy and Max to watch Surrey v Kent in this year’s Twenty20 competition.

Max and I watched a few Twenty20 games in Nottingham and we’ve also been to Lord’s once to see Middlesex, but the Oval is quite handy for getting to from work and also for Max, so this year we said we’d try to catch a few games. For various reasons it hasn’t worked out as we planned, but we finally made an arrangement to see this game, which is one of the last qualifiers.

It should have been a good game - local derby, some big names playing (including Kevin Pietersen, the England batsman) and Surrey needing to win all their remaining games to stand a chance of qualifying for the final. Surrey won the toss and put Kent into bat and they made a bit of a plodding 137, with some nice shots from Robert Key and some good fast bowling from Steve Finn. Pietersen took three catches, one of them a difficult forward dive.

We thought Surrey would knock off that score quite easily, especially with Pietersen in the batting line-up; in fact, we were a little worried that they wouldn’t need to hit out, they could just nurdle their way home. In fact Surrey were all out for 88 and Pietersen went lbw in the first over while I was getting a round of beers from the bar. It was the lowest all-out score in Twenty20!

So the match finished at around 9.40pm and I said that we should go to watch the opening of The Shard, which is by London Bridge and the tallest building in Europe at just over 1,000 feet. The exterior has just been completed and the occasion was being marked by a laser light show that promised to be quite spectacular. Max loves The Shard and he was up for it and Tom said he’d come along as well. Sam and Lucy weren’t interested, so they walked back to Stockwell for the Victoria Line and we headed for the crowds on the Northern Line.

Our plan was to watch from the north side of London Bridge, but when we got there the crowds were massive. London Bridge was completely blocked with people, so that all the traffic had been stopped and there was a double decker bus trapped in the middle.

There was something pagan about standing there in that massive crowd waiting for the show to start. It was as if we had come to worship the great shard and were waiting for the miracle to begin. It must have been like this at Stonehenge in its heydey - a big crowd moaning: “Is this it? I thought it would be more spectacular” - and someone else saying: “yes, but just wait until the sun rises, it will be fucking amazing!”

Anyway, we were a little underwhelmed by the laser show. Basically, The Shard changed colour several times (which I guess was quite clever) and some lasers flew out of the side and the top, including one that shone on the dome of St Paul’s across the river. The crowd soon got bored and started to drift away and we decided to go as it thinned out. Tom headed north for Bank and we went south to Borough High Street to miss the worst of the crowds.

London Bridge is packed with people - the bus is
stranded for over 45 minutes.