It was one of those things that my Father failed to tell me about, like checking your anchovies before paying for them. I had arranged to take two American geologists on the historical pub tour, frighteningly they wanted to start at midday. So it was that I met them (twenty minutes late due to a bomb scare) outside the National Film Theatre, Tom already firmly outside his first pint, Pat having eschewed the notion due to the hangover from the previous night, and burgeoning jet lag.
We set off, I took a breath to run quickly through the skyline, picked out the steeple of St Bride's, "That's St Brides....."
Tom, "That's the wedding cake one - right?"
"Oh umm, right. That's Cleopatra's nee..."
" Yeah found buried in sand in Egypt, brought over in a caisson 1877/78, and erected to commemorate the end of the Napoleonic Wars, 1815, money supplied by public subscription."
"Right, let's go to the first pub!"
To be fair, I had taken Pat on the crawl before, and they had spent a large part of the previous late afternoon/evening trawling up and down Fleet Street and the Strand, mind you he seemed to have pulled off a prodigious feat of memory. We crossed the river after a brief excursion to the lookout on the top of the Oxo Building, and went to my favourite pub, the Blackfriars. This is where we decided to have lunch, always a pretty hit or miss affair in a London pub. My pie was somewhere within the treble ring, Tom's fish was closer, Pat's (why do I want to eat it's friggin' 4 a.m) steak sandwich bounced off the outer wire and embedded itself somewhere in the nether regions of the pub carpet. We carried on, sticking our head in St Pauls for all the spiritual enlightenment you can get without paying £9/$17 and recrossing the Thames on "The Blade of Light" (official) or "The Wobbly Bridge" (tabloid).
"There's a TV!" The unjetlagged using his uncanny observational skills, honed by many years of having eyes.
"Oh yeah.".
We carried on deciding to refresh at the Anchor Bankside, and, after a pause, reemerged and set forth upon our riverine trek (Oh to be in Edinburgh, to make the pun work). After a quick stroll through Borough market, with Tom failing yet again to spot the hotpants, (there seems to be something about males together, in a country not of their own, the culture shock seems to produce a bonding pattern entirely based on wishful sex and some function of the area of exposed flesh) we ended up at the George 3rd.
Later we returned to the river.
"Hey! There's the TV again!"
Somewhat mellowed we meandered on, stopping off to admire various bits and marvel at Tower Bridge, (that's the one that should be at Lake Havasu but no-one bothered to tell the millionaire purchaser that it wasn't London Bridge - har har).
At this point I was beginning to rue the fact that they were geologists, the conversation was littered with:
"Hey isn't the food in Thailand great?"
"Yeah but what about the stuff they eat in Korea!"
"Had to spend a week off San Diego, saw twelve Blue Whales."
"Wow, the Arctic!"
"Yeah but the South Pole!"
"Oh yeah"
"Hawaii, what's your favourite island?"
We approached Tower Bridge, the rest of the evening was to be spent crawling along the north bank going to the historic Thameside pubs and ending up at the Prospect of Whitby, potentially the oldest pub in London.
Three quarters of the way across Tower Bridge, Pat started,
"There's the TV!"
Moral: While there may be nothing on TV, it's damn difficult to get away from.
