A short walk to the shops...

I have knitting to blog; I have handmade presents to blog.

But Christmas isn't quite over yet - I still have one with Jan to go - and I've only just finished the last Christmas knitting and haven't gifted it yet. So instead, this is a set of photos taken on a small shopping trip I made at lunchtime today. I left work, and a bus had just gone, and I had a good sweater on, and my camera, and the day was fine if cold; so I thought I'd take pictures of what I see on the way to my local bead shop.

The bottom of Whitehall, looking at the Cenotaph; with a bendy-bus (yay, Wikipedia-thesaurus-management!) in shot. Unfortunately the white thing on the left-hand pavement isn't any form of fleece-bearing animal; it's some sort of plastic barrier which just happens to look like the back end of a goat...

The MOD building; all very white. Outside there's a statue to a Master of Strategy... (and how cool is it that you can Google "master-of strategy" whitehall and get an actual photo of the statue, once yours turns out to be a bit crap?)

This is Downing Street. Yes, I always imagine something glammer, too. It does have a nice Christmas tree; but both sides are currently sheathed in scaffolding... The No. 10 website is also still in beta, in a nice symmetry...

Horseguards. Left-hand one with sign in view saying "BEWARE Horses: nasty bitey kicky things, we hates 'em..." Sort of.

Right-hand one, ditto: but I had to collect the set...

I'd have tried to get the same angle and all, but the place was absolutely stacked with tourists. I'd naïvely assumed that because I was back at work, so would everyone else be - duh. Over the top of a cab, I took a picture of the next street across (Great Scotland Yard)

past the souvenir kiosk...
and then up to Trafalgar Square
St Martin in the Fields looking very lovely in the sunlight...

... and the fountains were in full operation alongside the Christmas tree and the menorah...

Edith Cavell's statue is next; always gives me the shivers on the way past...

and then the Coliseum, home of ENO...

... past the end of Cecil Court, which is a haven for print and antiquarian book dealers...

and past the very modestly named Catholic Truth Society (maybe I'm just being over-sensitive here because I am one - I suspect the abbreviation doesn't mean much to most passers-by)...

... before reaching the final destination.

Their website has been down for ages, and so I took a chance - as it turned out, although upstairs was open for business, downstairs, which is where all the wholesale/high-volume stuff happens, was not; and they didn't have enough staff to be running up and down the stairs. Next week, perhaps... Was very glad I'd taken the photos for this post to assuage my disappointment...

Just round the corner are the St Martin's Theatre which has been showing The Mousetrap for the last 56 years, and The Ivy (with the green awnings outside).

And then back to Trafalgar Square and the gates to The Mall

And then back down Whitehall. The view is quite spectacular, as long as you don't mind gazing at the arses of horses all the way back to Parliament Square...

Takes just about a minute over an hour to do the round-trip including taking photos...

The voyage was not entirely a wash-out on the shopping front, though... I picked up a copy of The Moonstone for next week's Kniterati group... Hope they're as friendly as everything else I've been to at I Knit, and it's a favourite book - no idea where my copy went!