Just a couple of tram stops from Camden and your at Kings Cross Station. That is where we meet our hop on, hop off, red, roofless, double decker bus with guide and an opportunity to be the complete snap happy tourist!! We were ready for a day of action.

There are still millions of double decker red buses that stream through the streets of London non stop! I call this the Red River.

I am really not one for discussing weather and how the garden beds are going but having lived in London for quite a while I was fully blown out with the excellent weather and the flower pots adorning everything! Blue skies are a rarity in England and one of the main reasons I got so homesick and went back to Australia ..... Back in the day!

Blue skies, shining on me, nothing but blue skies do I see.....

The live commentary takes us back to the great plague, the Fire of London, the WW1 bombings and seriously funny (not) meanings behind rhymes and sayings like 'Laugh your head off', 'Hung drawn and quartered', Londons Burning' and 'Ring a ring a Rosie'. London sure took a beating! Imagine living there with all that in store.... And then surviving! Phew.

London is definitely not suffering now! The old and the new...

There is as many cranes as there are buildings! I really tried hard to exclude them from my postcard visions of sunny London. We counted eighteen looking across the Thames over the Tower of London area.

One of the stops was Harrods and in we paced with bus loads of tourists directed to the food hall. Mmmm mmmmm. Totally Impressed by the staff and their kindness to the hoards of people that pour through every day, photograph them working at their chocolatier counter handing out the most beautiful choc coated almonds I have ever eaten, directing us to floors, toilets, particular grandness or just asking the stupid question how much? like I did at the Alexander McQueen department. Sorry Tills no can do!

I can't go past putting up more of the tourist postcard shots with the blue skies!

the London Eye. People actually get married on this taking their vows at the top, guess it's all downhill from there..LOL

Go on 'laugh your head off'

Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, was a bit of a scoundrel and completely unliked by the people of England. He was arrested for treason in the mid 1700's and sentenced to death, however the people wanted to witness the slaying. A scaffold for spectators was built to view the beheading but it collapsed killing 20 people. This amused Lord Lovat so much that he could not stop laughing and in the flurry his head was then chopped off. This became the origin of the saying "laughing your head off"

There is a famous etching by William Hogarth, that depicts Lovat awaiting execution in The Tower, counting with his fingers the various Clans that he had brought undone. That made me think of Nick Caves murder ballad 'O'Malleys Bar'

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