London calling
Staying in the centre of city and having a fantastic dinner at the restaurant made famous by Channel 4’s First Dates made a perfect child-free break, says Garry “Giraffe” Spence
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about grandparents, it’s that they facilitate even more fun when you become an adult than they did when you were the child.
We had decided on a weekend city break to celebrate our anniversary and it was a good while since we’d been to London.
So up we headed to drop our little twins in Inverness with Granny and Papa before flying down for another adventure in the big smoke.
Our trips always follow roughly the same pattern when we manage a weekend away. Maybe it’s because we have full-time jobs and threeyear-old twins to get out the door every other morning, or maybe it’s because we’re lazy, but we almost never eat breakfast anywhere but the hotel room.
Fortunately, in the new Amba hotel, we couldn’t have had asked for better surroundings. It used to be known as The Thistle Marble Arch, and is one of the best we’ve ever stayed in.
At the end of the day, you’re in London so accommodation is always going to be the bulk of your budget, but as the old saying goes, “the good ones aren’t cheap, and the cheap ones aren’t good”.
The Amba hotel has just undergone a multi-million pound refurbishment and being only 20 seconds’ walk from Oxford Street, you couldn’t ask for a better base. Having dropped our cases off, and got our heads round the fact that the mini-bar is free (no, really, it’s included in the price), we headed for the Tube to a restaurant we’d looked into online, as we always do.
This time we were even more excited than usual, as we’d been researching the restaurant on Channel 4 every Friday night for most of the last year. Yes, we’d managed to get ourselves a table at the actual First Dates restaurant, the Paternoster Chop House.
Ruth is a show fanatic, so I’d looked online out of curiosity, and couldn’t believe it not only operates as a normal business, but had a table at 7.30pm on our first night in London.
Before you ask, you won’t be greeted by Fred and you won’t spot any of the staff from the show. That said, those on duty are ready for any questions you might have and they even wear the same uniform.
They couldn’t have been more accommodating and seemed to enjoy the excitement of a room full of people looking around at each going with an expression that said, ‘Can you believe we’re in the First Dates restaurant?’
Ruth was surprised by how dark the place was but I was fully expecting this, and pretty happy not to be sitting under three million volts of stage lighting. TV chat aside, the food was fantastic, all the usual cocktails were there and I was blown away by the price – they haven’t taken advantage on that front.
Following the almost out-of-body experience that is a child-free long lie, the next day was spent enjoying lunch in Covent Garden, before seeing The Woman in Black.
The horror film was released a couple of years back, and this was the play. In fact, it was a play within a play and it was exactly what we wanted, lots of bang for your buck when it came to ‘jumping out of your seat’ moments. We can definitely recommend it.
London is like no other city in the world and, for many of us, feels like the absolute centre of it.
Even without plans, you could easily fill a couple of days wandering the streets, seeing the sights and still feel like you’d ticked a lot of boxes.
This is exactly what we did in between anything else we had planned. The Underground must be up there with the best inventions in the world, making every landmark in the city accessible for under a tenner, even if the layout is a tad more complicated than the Glasgow Subway.
London, you were awesome as always and we’ll be back.
‘London is like no other city in the world’