Make friends with your inner tourist
JENNIFER WILLIAMS ticks off all the London cliches
WHEN Netflix unveiled its entire back-catalogue of Friends episodes last year, among the first I ended up re-watching was the one where Ross gets married in London.
It’s one of those almost unbearably blunt American caricatures of the British and our world-famous capital city: hammy English accents, Union Jack hats, toecurling and unexplained cameo appearances from Richard Branson - as a tourist tat-seller - and Fergie (the former royal, not the former United manager).
In a single episode it manages to wrap in every single postcard stereotype of London, from red open-top tour buses to stock footage of the guards changing outside Buckingham Palace guaranteed to appeal to American audiences while here on the other side of the pond, viewers cringe.
Yet it also reminded me just how much fun London is when you don’t know it at all, when you’ve never been there and when it isn’t somewhere just to get off at Euston and trudge to a meeting or a training session or the Heathrow Express.
It’s easy to forget the capital is more than an over-inflated housing market or somewhere to envy for its superior transport network, or be sneery about because it isn’t as good as Manchester (obviously).
But the fact remains that just two hours away from here is one of the world’s biggest tourist draws, a city so iconic that it makes people from other countries buy tiny models of Big Ben, Routemasters or red pillar boxes just to prove they’ve been there.
So it is in that spirit that I head down to stay at Dukes, a boutique gem tucked away in a corner of Mayfair I haven’t visited for years.
I cast aside my inverted Manchester snobbery - a little, anyway - and chuck myself in like an unashamed tourist, reliving the excitement I remember when first visiting London as a seven-year-old.
The first thing to say about Dukes is that it’s tricky to find, although none the worse for it.
A stone’s throw from Green Park tube, according to the map, we still end up doing an almost entire circuit of the park, past the grand gates of St James’s Palace, down the Mall and round again in our search.
In fact there turns out to be a teeny-tiny alleyway cutting through the grand, inescapably London architecture - it could only be London - that emerges into the most quintessentially London square imaginable.
And then, inside, the hotel itself is every bit as London as any tourist could ever wish for.
Immaculately dressed - and immaculately polite - staff take us up in a tiny lift oozing old-world English charm, like a set from an Agatha Christie adaptation.
Our enormous suite, full of understated elegance, features everything I could hope for from a luxurious Mayfair hideaway, from the thick white bathrobes to the enormous, sumptuously comfortable bed.
And then, the cocktail bar.
Downstairs, tucked away discreetly everything about this hotel is discreet - is the kind of bar you ideally need a smoking jacket to fully enjoy.
It feels like a gentleman’s club, or at least how, not being a gentleman, I imagine a gentleman’s club feels.
(The Carlton Club, the elite private members’ hideaway favoured by generations of English aristocracy and Conservative MPs, is just around the corner from Dukes. Given membership is by nomination and election only, I can’t guarantee you’ll get in, so this makes for a pretty good alternative.)
The hotel’s expert cocktail-maker whisks up his perfectly spicy - and I have high standards on these things - version of a Bloody Mary, after which we move on to sample the delights of their wine list.
There are far worse ways to while away a crisp winter’s afternoon.
We get so comfortable we almost forget to tear ourselves away into the glitz of the capital, but you’d be hard-pushed to find a better spot for a bit of tourist rubber-necking.
The Mall and Buckingham Palace are less than five minutes walk in one direction; the Ritz just as close, the other way.
But instead we branch out to the West End, a stone’s throw away, sampling something just as quintessentially English, in its own way - a cheap-and-cheerful curry.
And then on to the tourist throngs of Covent Garden, catching a play before giggling, on our way home, at the Mayfair menus advertising food at silly prices and then collapsing back in the luxury of our bolt-hole.
It may be that London, but every once in a while, there is joy to be hand in the simple pleasures of being a tourist.
Joey and Chandler, eat your hearts out.