Posts Tagged ‘london’

Two years ago we opened Leeds Anxiety Clinic and it has been a big success. Depending on your value of success. We have been very busy and are inundated with clients, which is a business success, but perhaps not a success for the state of society’s mental health.

We are now expanding and have opened a second branch in London, the Islington Anxiety Clinic. If you are in the London area and are looking for support in managing your anxiety, we’re here to help.

The property price differences between London and anywhere that is not London have been well documented. A small garden shed in the capital will set you back far more than a three bedroomed house in Darlington. But what if you have some cash to splash?

This came to mind recently when I saw two properties for sale.

One was this £30,000,000 house in London.

What can you get in London?

Technically, it is detached. But, if you look at how close the next building is to it, you could be forgiven for not realising this. And there is no doubt that it is a nice house. But if we look at the description…

Today this Grade II listed building currently extends to circa 9490 square feet (881 square metres).The property is in need of full modernisation but retains a number of period features.

…it turns out it is a fixer-upper.

What can you get in Leeds?

Compare this to the £32,000,000 property you can get in Leeds. It is two million pounds more, of course, so you are expecting something a little better.

That’s right, it’s Leeds Dock. It is a 1,200,000 square foot site complete with 1,100 apartments. And loads of office space. And a bar. And a restaurant (but it’s only a Pizza Express). And a casino (now closed). And the Royal Armouries Museum.

Recently put up to sale for £32,000,000 by its owners Allied London. Which is significantly more than the £1.5 million they paid for it just five years ago.

Five Star Babies was a two part BBC documentary looking at Portland Hospital, a private maternity hospital in London. No expense is spared. The dining is gourmet, you get your own private consultant, and the birthing suites come with a lounge area for guests.

Having not been through the process myself, it’s hard to judge some aspects. For example, sending your baby off to the nursery for the first few days. If that was an option, I think I might take them up on that. As a new parent, I imagine I am going to want all the help I can get.

Other things just seemed downright strange though. Sending your new-born off for a clean and a nappy before holding it for example. That seems like a weird rich-person thing. In fact one of the most interesting confessions on the show was when one of the nannies admitted that she almost always saw the baby’s first smile, but would never tell the parents that.

There is also something about private healthcare. My dad told about the time my granddad went private for something. He needed pain relief and the doctor, rather than recommended what would be best, just gave them a price list. The quotes for epidurals, which come in at just under £1,000 if you are interested, reminded me of that.

As the show goes on, it just becomes silly. People redecorating entire floors, bringing in their own designers, making secret entrances and spending up to £250,000 reveal a deep problem with the growing income inequality in the UK. Do you need all of that? The answer is almost certainly, no.

For what I loosely described as a stag do, I headed down to Wembley Stadium for the Jets v Dolphin NFL game.

The seats were okay. We were in the premium club. I have previously wondered whether being in the lower tier would be better, but you do actually get a good view and can see the entire field. The only issue was that being on the north side we had the sun in our eyes, so being on the other side would have been a lot better. That disappeared after the 4th quarter though, and the view improved.

The merch was not run very well. We got there several hours early and they had already closed the NFL shop saying the queue was too big. Why they could not just run it throughout the entire game was unclear. They had other merch shops inside, but they had all run out of caps, missing an opportunity to make a significant buck out of Norman and I who were not prepared for the sun making an appearance.

The game itself was pretty good. It was nice to follow a game I did not care that much about as I could relax and enjoy it. Last time I saw the NFL at Wemeberly it was the 49ers v Jaguars. Obviously, it was the Jaguars, so no chance of the 49ers losing, but it was still a little tense. It got very exciting when the Dolpins looked like they would make a forth quarter comeback but sadly it was not to be.

The food was good too. I had the world’s longest hot dog, which itself was covered in pulled pork. I couldn’t finished it.

A good day all around. Thanks to everyone who came to keep me company, especially my dad who drove there and back!

While in London, we stayed at the Judd Hotel. It was a mixed bag.

On the good side:

• It was nicely furnished
• The staff were friendly
• Good location, just round the corner from King’s Cross
• It included a cooked breakfast

On the bad side:

• It was freezing cold – the doors and windows did not fit properly which let the cold and the noise in
• The bathroom was so tiny I could barely fit in it
• The wifi might have been free, but it sucked. I couldn’t access my emails or connect to my VPN and trying to download anything was lost cause.

Earlier this month we visited ICE Totally Gaming to get to know potential customers and suppliers. It was my first trip to the ExCeL centre which is predictably huge.

Many of the stalls were very impressive. One had a slot machine connected up to a Oculus Rift headset and when you won you got taken on a roller coaster ride.

Not surprisingly, there were lots of men in suits and women in far less clothing. I was very proud of the good twenty minutes we spent discussing sexism and objectification of women.Then we had a good stare.

London was as horrible as ever. It took me an hour and a half in a taxi to get there the first morning.

If you take a look at Wikipedia’s list of best-selling books of all time, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens comes right at the top. Of course, it was published over 150 years ago, so who can say where Fifty Shades of Grey will be after a similar time has lapsed…

It also shares a very similar name with the Leeds-based food blog A Tale of Two Sittings. I am not sure whether it is a deliberate reference to the book, or whether the blog pre-dates the novel and Dickens was making a reference to the blog. More research is needed.

Dickens tells the tale of a small cast of characters and their jet-setting lifestyle between London and Paris, both before and during the French Revolution. It takes quite a while to get into. I think I got to about half way through the book, still wondering what it was actually about. Of course it all comes together in the end though to form a beautiful tapestry of interwoven stories that culminate in what is probably a happy ending. Ignoring the tens of thousands that went to the guillotine of course…

At the end of October we went down to Wembley to watch the San Francisco 49ers at the Jacksonville Jaguars.

It was quite worried before going in that the stadium would be so huge I would find it intimidating, but it was actually okay – I found it a lot better than the MEN, despite it holding four or five times as many people. The hot dogs were pretty good. The queues to get into the stadium were annoying.

The game ended 42-10, which was always going to happen given Jacksonville has lost all 8 games this season, and the 49ers went to the Super Bowl last year. It would have been nice if the game had been a little closer, but far more enjoyable than spending all that money to see San Francisco lose.

It moves quite slowly on TV, with them constantly stopping and starting. But that wasn’t the case in the stadium. Between every play there were a band, the cheerleaders doing a dance, scoring from NFL Red Zone or other distractions to keep you entertained. In fact, before I knew what was happening, the game was over!

Here are some photos, albeit taken on my phone:

The Jaguars ran onto the field with flags twice. This is from the second time; the first time they spelt it “JAGAURS”.

Also a panorama, click for full size:

On the Saturday evening we stayed at the Belgrave Hotel in London. Or at least one of them. According to the internet there are two in London with that name, so for clarification it was the one on Belgrave Street.

It was okay for what it was. It had a big TV that I was able to watch the Grand Prix on on the Sunday morning (luckily it was on BBC, as they only had limited Sky Sports like most hotels seem to) and the shower was nice. The room was what you would expect from a London hotel though – pretty tiny. The wifi was unusably slow when I tried it also.

This year, I attended GRAM – Group Representatives Annual Meetup, first the first time. GRAM is an event organised by the British Humanist Association, that brings together the leaders of affiliated groups to talks, discussions and ideas.

The event was held at the Quaker headquarters on Euston Road, which turned out to be a really nice building. I was expecting it to be someone bare, given Quakers are often minimalistic, but it was actually very well furnished inside.

While a lot of the talks weren’t that interesting, it was certainly inspiring to hear other group leaders talk about what they have been doing in their group – something like what we used to do at the AHS, where each group would deliver a quick update, would have worked really well.

There were also some heated discussions between some of the BHA representatives and some of the local groups, regarding the much tighter restrictions being placed on local groups by the BHA. For example, if you try to search for your local humanist group, some groups are now excluded from the map.

Overall, it was reasonably useful. It’s somewhat different to how I imagined, and how we run things like Sunrise Conference, but was useful for catching up with the latest developments on a national level.