In-Ger-Land!

• In my head the flight to London was genius planning:  leaving NYC at 9pm-ish, and then landing in London about 9am.  We’d save on a night’s accommodation, and arrive after a full night’s sleep raring to go.  In reality, it’s a 7-hour flight, about 6 and ¾ of which is taken up with ascent, descent, food, and a movie (it’s a key tenet of international law that you must watch at least one film on any international flight).  So no-one got any sleep and we arrived not exactly raring to go

• It’s super easy to get from Heathrow into London on the train, even when you have a shipping container’s worth of luggage. London is a proper big city, but it’s an order of magnitude more chilled out than NYC and everything just feels simpler.  On account of the lack of sleep, day one was pretty uneventful, although we did find these nice steps:

Don't give the setlist away!

• Day two was a different story.  Bo had booked the girls in for the opening ceremony at Hamley’s, London’s biggest toy shop.  Hamley’s is so good, a crowd gathers before it opens, and lucky children get to work with the costumed staff to ring the bell to open the shop.  Mo looked moderately traumatised at being in the public spotlight, but the deed was done

• Some good mates from NZ were in London the same time we were, so we met up with them at Hamley’s for a whirlwind downtown London sightseeing extravaganza:  Picadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Big Ben, and the London Eye

Circus clowns

• Our big London day happened to be the same day as the Lionesses’ Euro 25 victory parade, amongst an estimated 70,000 lined up down The Mall as the bus drove down towards Buckingham Palace. After winning back to back Euros, as well as making a World Cup final, the team are proper national treasures. The scrappy nature of this win, with comebacks, late goals, and penalty shootouts only added to their appeal, and it was great to see the universal love for a champion team

This family loves a free hat giveaway

• We’d booked in for a proper pub lunch at the Red Lion, which didn’t disappoint, followed by a quick wander around St James Park.  The girls were disappointed with only seeing a solitary squirrel, but the mildly terrifying pelicans made up for it

Proper pub lunch

• We’d organised to meet some other ex-pat friends for an after-work beer, and serendipitously the pub was hosting an Oasis-themed pub quiz.  Turns out we know quite a lot about Oasis, and our London mates now have a large bar tab to enjoy

Always knew knowing the lyrics to obscure Oasis b-sides would pay off one day

• Our Oasis show was on Wednesday, so we’d planned to have a pretty cruisy day to conserve (the kids’) energy:  a big sleep-in, Premier Inn breakfast (kids eat free!), and a quick stroll through Hyde Park to the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, which is essentially a giant paddling area that the kids loved

• We were staying at Wembley Park, a short walk to the stadium and right next to the main train station and Wembley Way, the half mile or so of walkway leading up to the ground.  It had been a pretty good people watch all day, and was ramping up as we got the train back in the afternoon with big groups of fans arriving in earnest, bedecked in bucket hats, vintage Man City ‘Brother’ shirts, a lot of the rather snazzy Oasis x Adidas merch, and the occasional parka in mid-20s sunshine.  A great many large cans of Stella were being consumed, and there was a lot of excitement in the air

• Wembley is massive – about 90,000 capacity.  For shows you lose about a quarter of the seats due to the stage set-up, but gain a load of fans on the pitch area.  We skipped the first support act, Cast, but got there just in time for Richard Ashcroft, with about 2/3 of the crowd in and filling fast.  Ashcroft looked and sounded great, and rolled out half of Urban Hymns to a crowd who knew every word.  “Bittersweet Symphony” is a pretty great way to leave a crowd amped up for the main event

• And the main event delivered.  I’d nerdily read along with a live blog of the first Cardiff show, and they’ve played the exact same set at every show since (putting the songs on the Wembley steps in order is a bit of a giveaway too) so there were no surprises.  They’re famously not a band that moves about at all on stage, banter is limited to a few mouthy Liam soundbites, and the AV backdrop was the bare minimum of what you’d expect at any a stadium show.  But those songs!  Especially the first half, loaded up with the louder and faster tunes including my faves “Acquiesce”, “Cigarettes and Alcohol” and “Bring It On Down”.  There’s a Noel solo set, some well-chosen b-sides, and a back half and encore stacked with tunes that 90,000 people were desperate to blissfully bellow along with. Liam's voice is still singularly brilliant, and "Live Forever" and "Slide Away" were immense

Alright, our kid?

• Our kids were not that excited about coming, and wore Bunnings earmuffs against the grunty volume.  Mo got into it as the show went on, but Kitty was a hard sell, even with chocolate bribes

• Apparently each show went through 250,000 pints, but it was slightly less boozy and laddish than I’d expected.  A presumably deliberate handbrake on the lairiness was the super slow bar service, partly because the England’s national stadium had chosen the high tech approach of slowly pouring each beer from a can into a plastic pint glass as you ordered it

• We were very glad to not be joining 89,000 gig-goers in trying to catch the tube home, but getting stuck in the madness of that many humans trying to leave one place and all walk in the same direction at the same time was still quite something

• We had a pretty low-key day after the gig too – another wander through Hyde Park, and some Harry Potter Lego shopping

• Greggs sausage rolls are terrific. 10/10, no notes

• Next stop was some family visits up north.  I went to pick up the rental car, and got a good dose of British traffic – the 10 mile journey from Kings Cross station back to Wembley to get the girls took an hour and a half

• We headed up to see the Crewe crew (two uncles, an aunt, and a cousin-in-law) in Cheshire, and the Barnsley bunch (uncle and aunt) in Yorkshire.  We’d last seen them almost exactly 10 years ago, with a very small baby Mo and Kitty not yet on the scene.  It was lovely to catch up

• The UK is about the same size as NZ, and has roughly 10 times the population, most of whom live within a few hundred miles of each other.  The entire motorway system appears to be in a constant traffic jam.  We’d built a bit too much driving into too short a time, so it was a tiring couple of days.  Fortunately, the kids had hours of fun by inventing the ‘Harry Potter characters sing Taylor Swift karaoke’ game;  Ron Weasley doing “Bad Blood” got my vote

• Motel TV is a lot of quiz shows and Northern accents reading weather reports, which I find quite comforting

• We had a night in Nottingham, where I was born, and enjoyed the tram-only city centre and studenty vibes.  We checked out Anish Kapoor’s “Sky Mirror”, a sister piece to Chicago’s “Cloud Gate” aka “The Bean’, and Nottingham Castle and its Robin Hood statue (the girls were also quite taken by the bloke greeting visitors to the Castle in full Robin Hood costume)

Take that, Sheriff of Nottingham!

• There’s been a lot written about the decline of the British pub, with thousands closing down in recent years.  We did still see a lot of good examples as we drove round the country, and had lunch at an absolute cracker – Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, which claims to be England’s oldest inn, although Google has a slightly differing opinion.  It’s built in the caves under Nottingham Castle, and has been open since knights stopped in on the way to the Crusades.  It’s still tiny, dark, and pouring excellent pints  of real ale to a big crowd 

Another proper pub

• We also went to a Wetherspoons, the mega-chain that’s thriving as independently owned pubs close.  I felt a bit guilty for not seeking out a little guy to support, but it was across the road from our motel – tiredness and convenience trumped doing the right thing. It was actually really good - top notch kids menu and ridiculously cheap prices for decent food and drink

• We also stopped into Worksop in north Nottinghamshire, where my grandparents lived and my dad was born.  We drove by their old house, where my grandma lived for almost 80 years, from her wedding day until she was 100.  We also had a great few hours at Welbeck Estate – one of the area’s historic country estates, where my grandma’s family worked as a driver and in the post office.  The estate is now best known for a market garden, farm shop, and craft brewery, with a load of rambling walking trails

Estate agents

• Last stop in the UK was Watford, for the Warner Bros Studio Harry Potter tour.  The kids are recent converts to the books, but have fallen hard.  Mo ploughed through all seven books at a rate of knots, and I’ve been reading a chapter a night to Kitty for the last few months.  They’re mad for Harry Potter Lego, and have spent hours on the trip recreating movie scenes with minifigs, and inventing new plotlines

• The tour is housed in a couple of the giant soundstages, and collects dozens of the original sets, and hundreds of props and costumes from the movies.  I’m only a fan by proxy, but it’s impossible not to be awed by the incredible craft and astonishing detail on show, especially the bigger pieces like the Great Hall, Diagon Alley, Gringott’s, the Hogwarts Express, and the Knight Bus

Some muggles

• I don’t need too much prompting to feel bad about the upcoming AI-enabled future, but it will be an unequivocally bad outcome if the amazing real world craftsmanship on show here, representing many thousands of hours of skilled labour and ingenuity and many millions of pounds well spent, is lost to the much cheaper and easier charms of AI

• The shop is also an epic monument to commerce, selling all possible manner of merch, including a recreated Ollivander’s wand shop where both Mo and Kitty purchased wands.  We also got a giant chocolate frog, and a pack of Bertie Botts’ ‘Every Flavour Beans’, which really do include such delights as dirt, earwax, and vomit

• The UK loves a roundabout, and the most utterly bonkers one I’ve ever seen is at Hemel Hempstead.  It’s called “The Plough”, also known as “the Magic Roundabout” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Hemel_Hempstead)) and features six mini roundabouts arranged in a circle, where traffic flows both clockwise and anticlockwise, leading to a general vibe of ohmygoodgodwhatishappening?  Amazingly, in a 2011 poll to find the UK’s worst roundabout, it only took silver.  Mental note to never go near Swindon, home of the winner