Country life
Up, up and away
Leanda de Lisle
Townies go to the country for the week- end, but country folk go to town. Usually we visit Leicester, but this weekend we wanted to see the capital from the London Eye. The views, the gossip, I'm going to tell you all. But, first, back to Leicester.
One of our favourite shops in Leicester is what we call the Head Shop. It sells cargo pants, tie-dye T-shirts and earrings with hooks like rusty pins — just what you need for the hippy chick look. It also sells a lot of dope smokers' kit, including How to Grow Marijuana manuals and 'stash boxes' with pictures of cannabis plants on them. I thought the latter would send up those ubiquitous Halcyon Days enamel boxes and I briefly considered buying some for one of our sofa tables.
However, I have decided that public endorsement of illegal drug use falls into the 'neither clever nor funny' category. This is largely because I have a 13-year-old son and have become acutely aware of all the drug dealers' propaganda his genera- tion are subjected to. For example, the other day I found him playing a computer game called 'Drug Wars'. It gave a price for every conceivable kind of illegal drug, with its street name. You were then invited to sell the drugs for profit. My son thought himself very clever for having downloaded it from the Internet.
Since I am usually pretty liberal he was quite shocked by my reaction ('Great. Why don't they call it the "How many people can I give Aids to game", or the "Let's spread misery, degradation and despair fun pack"?'). But I eventually calmed down. What he chose to do with the game had to be his decision since I have no effective control over what he chooses to store on his computer. Happily, he decided to erase it and I just hope that it's my disgust, rather than the tidy sum he could make out of drug-dealing, that he will remember.
Anyway, off to London to enjoy the rem- nants of my sons' childhood. Unlike the Millennium Dome, the London Eye sound- ed unpretentious and fun and we had a perfect day for our so called 'flight'. The sun shone from a clear sky on to the black- and-white spotted double-decker buses below. This wasn't some trick of the light (or a drug-induced hallucination). They were filming A Hundred and Two Dalma- tians (the sequel to A Hundred and One) and the streets were packed with spotty people and spotty taxis as well as spotty buses. My nine-year-old posed for a picture with a film extra before we walked to col- lect our pre-booked tickets from County Hall.
There was a five-minute wait for our tickets and a five-minute queue for our place in one of the wheel's glass bubbles — just enough time to eat a stick of candy floss. Then we were off. The pods are very like ski bubbles, but travel more slowly. It gave me a slightly queasy feeling which wasn't made better by the fact that the bub- bles heat up in the sun. However, I was soon distracted from my discomfort by the unfolding views. What a film set spread before us — what a city. We felt as if we were practically on top of Big Ben and all at once we could also see Canary Wharf, St Paul's and No. 10 Downing Street.
Our bubble's hostess pointed out less well-known sights, such as Jeffrey Archer's flat, I restrained myself from asking one of my fellow tourists for his binoculars, but pricked up my ears when I heard our host- ess add, 'He won't be living there for much longer.' Why was that? 'A friend of his told me his wife has finally decided to divorce him,' she confided. This was such an outra- geous piece of gossip I was convinced it must be true. I await its confirmation with some dismay, for what would a lovable rogue be without love? Just another story from wheel life.
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