The (Late) Lowdown on London (Part 3)

So then what do I make out of my nine-day London city break? In an ideal world I might have made more of an adventure out of it rather than stick to the roads well travelled that span an area comprised between Covent Garden and Oxford Street but on this particular occasion I realised that I was more after a break than an actual city break.

I still managed to stretch my comfort zone to a long walk across The Mall and down The Embankment on that glorious Spring day, play the tourist with my latest digital camera in tow, massage my ego down Bond Street, pay Fenwick a visit and lose myself in the Britishness of Fortnum & Mason. I purchased some of my all-time favourite Charbonnel & Walker chocolates and Farrah toffee, succumbed to the joys of high tea served in plush tea rooms, treated myself to coffee & walnut cake - my favourite British delicacy. I sampled those already familiar little bits of (eye) candy that make Britannia what it stands for in my mind: well-packaged, delicate and exquisite. The devil was in the detail.

Down the line I even took the time to strike up lovely conversations with some lovely folks and even won a huge box of Thorntons chocolates from a random HSBC branch I was randomly walking past! These all made my day in their own special way!

London in a nutshell was a breath of fresh air for the city girl in me who had been living the rural island life for over two years now and who had been banging on about the buzz, the pulse, the vibe, the visual identity of the big city. I needed that. I needed to immerse myself in it, go crowd surfing, dizzily transported past tall elegant architectural buildings with things to notice, people to watch and a nod to familiar concepts from my career past: brand identity, retail theatre and consumer behaviour. Yeah as cliché as this may sound, you can take me out of marketing but you can't take marketing out of me!

The Covent Garden Academy of Flowers