A little bit of sparkle in the grey

The Christmas tree by city hall twinkling in the grey surroundings.  

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you all.  Enjoy your skiing and snowball fights or surfing and barbecuing wherever you are in the world, thank you for popping in throughout the year and sharing my glimpses of London with me.  I'm taking taking a few days break but will be back before the year ends. In the meantime lookout for my Instagram posts.

It's Jumper Day Today

Expect to see a lot more Xmas jumpers today as it is the official Xmas Jumper day today.  I did prepare you for it in an earlier post here.  What features on yours?

A Young Choir

Commuters were entertained at Euston railway station by this young choir singing "Away in A Manger" and other well known carols.

Christmas Carols

Travellers at St Pancras Station being entertained by the melodic voices of a group of scouts singing Christmas carols, all in aid of funding their jamboree in 2015.

Santa's Sack

Santa and the elves are loading up the sleigh ready for that annual journey around the world.  Those NASA folks could learn a lot from them about efficient time travel.

Shakespeare and Christmas

What do you suppose the Baird would make of all these festivities?

Ted counts beans

Cacao (cocoa) beans that is .. the little gems that give life to chocolate, the world’s favourite confectionery. We love it so much we spend more than 20 billion dollars every year on chocolate and chocolate products.  The Mayans and the Aztecs had it all pretty much to themselves for a long time. In fact, they considered the beans so valuable that they used them as a currency. Naturally as long as there has been currency there have been counterfeits, and their's were made of terracotta.

Christopher Columbus and then the Spanish Conquistadors whisked the beans back to Spain where they proceeded to make “xocolatl” (bitter water) in the Aztec fashion. They sweetened it up with honey and a few herbs and introduced it into the Austrian royal courts in the early 17^th century, where it gained immediate favour, and within 100 years it was widespread throughout Europe.

From that time to this chocolate has seduced human kind and been accorded fabulous powers – it has the ability to make us feel good, fight tooth decay, help prevent heart attacks,  increase IQs, why it even acts as an aphrodisiac apparently.  However, supposedly this only really applies to the 70% cacao plus level of dark chocolate, and not the sugar laden impersonators that inhabit our supermarket shelves.  Sadly "white" chocolate, like common sense, just “isn’t”.

So it was with high hopes of a sensory experience that I headed off to the London chocolate festival, where the purveyors of all things that you can make from chocolate (and quite a number you can’t) were gathered to let us experience and purchase their wares.

I started with a choux pastry filled with chocolate praline crème, accompanied by a Bailey’s Belgium chocolate liqueur. After a few moments of over excitement I calmed down and took in the surroundings.  There were chocolate stalls with chocolates goodies in all shapes and sizes from all over, chocolate baubles for the Christmas tree, chocolate making and tasting classes, and even chocolate art. As if that wasn’t enough there was a Christmas market filled with things that any good chocoholic should have like chocolate moulds, fondue pots, and knives for cutting chocolate. Phew ... Oh I almost forgot to add, chocolate also has life-saving powers. Well it did for Milton Hershey anyway when he had to cancel his trip on the Titanic due to chocolate related business … 

Christmas Morning Dip

It's a tradition for some Londoner's to take an early morning dip in the Serpentine (the lake in Hyde Park).  This is not just for anyone, they must qualify and spend several months before hand to win a place in this freezing dip. They are led out to the water by a piper playing "Scotland the Brave"

The line up - ready, steady.....

Jump, dive or slide in as your number is called out.

 Then the thaw out.  Every age has taken part of this crazy event.

Merry Christmas

Carnaby street robins wish you a very merry christmas

Bloomsbury Lights

The pretty lights at Brunswick shopping centre in Bloomsbury that change through a range of colours, green, pink, purple, orange, red and yellow.

Eros Snow Globe

Eros has been turned into a giant snow globe for Christmas.  Snow flakes tumble down inside it, and you just want to give it a good shake to make it really snowy.  I loved these things as a kid how about you?

Festive Street

Only a week until Christmas! Time to start showing you some of the festive lights around the city.  This  is the main street in Forest Gate.

Christmas Tree

The christmas tree in Covent Garden.  

Christmas Carols

Carol singing, Christmas markets and a chilly breeze, it's definitely that time of year again.  Roasting chestnuts, mulled wine and hot chocolate, the smells of the season.  It's all there at Southbank.

Happy Xmas

 Merry Xmas
Even Santa is chilling out.
Hope you are all having a lovely day relaxing and thinking how wonderful life is.

Christmas windows

The Christmas lights have all been turned on by well known (and some lesser well known) celebrities. Now it's the turn of the big store windows to vie for our attention.  They shout out "come on in, you know we have everything that you could possible want or need to buy as a Christmas gift for anyone".  In a small twist on a famous line from the Bladerunner movie ... "time to buy"  

White Snow Queen

A Xmas character I am not so familiar with, whom I met at the Scandinavian Xmas market at Rotherhithe on the weekend.  The white snow queen.  She was a hit with kids and adults alike.  I'm hoping some of my Scandinavian readers can tell me more about her.

It is always fun to find out about the folklore from around the world that we are seeing more and more of creeping into Xmas festivities.

The market was selling everything from furniture to bear pate, yes you did read that right, I passed very quickly on that last item and settled for a pickled herring sandwich.
One of the highlights of the market for me was more of that delicious crisp gingerbread that I showed you yesterday.  I have packets of the stuff now.

Molton Street that runs off Oxford Street near the Bond Street tube, has some of the prettier Xmas lights I've seen so far this year. 

Oxford Street has gone totally commercial with it's Marmite Xmas lights.  As the sign says, you'll either love it or hate it.