Feel Good London (or things that make you say 'Aaw')

Image from streetpianos.com

Don't believe the naysayers; we're not all rude, overworked, passive aggressive cynics, tutting and elbowing each other on public transport. The spectacular opening ceremony for London 2012 has ushered in a new mood of friendly optimism in the capital. 

London is full to the brim of feel-good, cute, heart-warming and magical moments, if you look hard enough. Here are just a few of my highlights...

1. Play the piano  

Street Pianos, Leicester Square. (Image from madsilence.wordpress.com)

Chances are you might have already spotted one of these friendly looking pianos somewhere in London this summer, each one handpainted with the instructions, 'Play me, I'm yours'.

From Holland Park and Marble Arch, to Liverpool Street Station and the Gherkin, wherever you are in London, you are never far away from your very own 'street piano'.

Pensioners, kids, city workers, night time revellers, wannabe buskers and high street shoppers have all been spotted taking some time out to tinkle the ivories, much to the surprise and delight of passers by.

According to the artist Luke Jerram, the Street Pianos project brings together invisible communities in London. People who might pass each other every day without a word now might just have a reason to stop for five minutes, smile, listen and sing with strangers. 

Still dubious? Check out the group performance of Hey Jude in Soho...

2. Dog watching in Battersea Park

People-watching is overrated, bird-watching even more so. But dog watching? That's a thing.

As locals take their mutts on their Sunday morning walks in parks across the city, you can enjoy a cross-section of doggy London. Noble old labradors, pampered pugs, scruffy terriers and clumsy spaniels come out in full force for their daily scamper. It's impossible not to smile as they joyfully run, leap and frolic around as though they're in Disneyland.

Dogs are the ultimate ice-breakers. I am like a moth to a flame when I see a cute dog, try as I might, I can't stop myself from going and saying hello in a ridiculous voice. And it's another of those rare but marvellous situations when Londoners really don't think it's weird to be spoken to by a stranger.

3. Tributes to selflessness at Postman's Park

Tucked away in an unremarkable little park near St Paul's Cathedral, the lives of extra-ordinary people are immortalised in a beautiful way. Under an easily overlooked canopy in the corner of Postman's Park, surrounded by office blocks, are fifty Art Nouveau tiles embossed with the stories of people who have tragically died while saving the life of another.

These are not the tales of generals or officers - just ordinary Victorian civilians who gave the ultimate sacrifice. Reading their stories doesn't feel morbid or macabre. Instead, a quiet hour browsing the tributes - each with fascinating insights and flashes of detail like paraffin lamps and runaway horses - takes you back in time to Victorian London and introduces you to the Herberts, Marys and Godfreys whose heroism time might otherwise have forgotten.

4. Support the old family-run places in your area

Marine Ices, Chalk Farm (Image from ninaicecream.co.uk)

In a city full of self-consciously rustic and quirky establishments with distinctly modern price tags, it's rare and wonderful when you discover the real thing. Every neighbourhood has them, Fawlty Towers style operations where the decor hasn't changed for at least 20 years and retro classic dishes are served without a trace of irony. 

Marine Ices in Chalk Farm, the oldest ice-cream parlour in London, is a family-run Italian, which couldn't look more dated if it tried - but the great thing is it's not trying, at all. Where else in London can you still get a proper Knickerbocker Glory? Plus, your granddad would approve of the generous ratio of prices to portions. 

London is still just a collection of villages, really, and despite their dwindling numbers, there is a total feel-good factor to finding and supporting your local independent greasy spoons, dusty bookshops, barber shops and butchers. You know you're winning when the start asking if you want your 'usual'.

5. Read the Metro Good Deed Feed 

Let it never be said that chivalry is dead. As long as accident-prone women keep leaving things on public transport, there will always be good deeds in London.

I have a dark green cashmere scarf from Zara that has been on adventures and misadventures across the world, and continues to find it's way back to me, like a trusty homing pigeon. My faithful scarf has been left at the Royal Festival Hall, on the pavement, at a lunchtime disco, even in Germany - but I've always managed to retrieve it thanks to kind people handing it in to lost property.

Now, we finally have a way of thanking these honest folk. If a fellow Londoner has ever paid your bus fare, lent you a tissue, ran after you when you've left cash at an ATM, or given you their cab, simply text into Metro's Good Deed Feed and let them know they made  your day.

If however your hero is a hottie, you may however prefer to text into Rush Hour Crush, another of Metro's new feel-good reader columns. (It's like a less pervy version of Tube Crush).

6. Receiving a free meal in Pret

Image from photographersdirect.com

I got let off paying for my Monday morning Pret a Manger breakfast a few weeks ago, in a confusing encounter. The till assistant just mumbled, 'Don't worry about it', and then served the person behind me. I must have looked hungry. 

I did feel a bit like a thief... but not enough to insist on paying (a free ham, mozzarella and tomato croissant and mocha tastes even better than usual). But apparently I’m not special – the same thing recently happened to my friend at work in a completely different part of London, and upon further discussion, we uncovered an urban legend that every London branch gives a free meal out every single day!

Whether this is a) true, or b) heartwarming is debatable. It could of course be a myth or a cynical marketing ploy circulated by the company to encourage loyal custom. But who cares? Free food simply brightens up my day.

Fifty Shades of Escapism: this year's holiday reads

Escapism, for me, could just as easily be listening to a bit of Schubert at my desk as watching back-to-back episodes of The Bachelor on Sky Plus. High culture and trash culture take me to very different places but both have a special place in my heart, and this is why I have long objected to the idea of a hierarchy of tastes.

So with that in mind, I gave myself a well-rounded reading list of novels for my holiday which consisted of the beautiful, the silly, the classic and the downright filthy - starting, of course, with Fifty Shades of Grey.

My only criteria for a holiday read, as opposed to something to read on the Tube, is that it should, above all else, be a page-turner.

Risks should be avoided. Your much-needed two week break is no time to be forcing yourself to read something that doesn't make you want to whip it out at every pause in the conversation. A holiday read should, like everything else you do on the trip, feel like pure indulgence. (This does not necessarily always correlate to a well-written book, as I discovered...).

With the right book on holiday, you can have a truly multi-sensory reading experience, with your enjoyment of the book being enhanced by the feeling of the sun on your skin, the breeze in the palm trees and the perfume of exotic flowers in the air. With the wrong book, you’ll end up reading your friend’s dog-eared magazine for the seventh time while listening to the loud Aussies on the adjacent sunloungers discussing where they’re going to have dinner.

1. Fifty Shades of Grey, EL James

Michael Fassbender: my perfect Christian Grey (albeit slightly older than Christian's 27 years)

When I left for Indonesia, Fifty Shades of Grey was a very popular book that most girls I know had either read or planned on reading. I'm not quite sure what happened in the interim, but on my return, it seemed it had actually taken over the world. (My favourite headline so far is a toss-up between ‘Peter Andre to pen male version of Fifty Shades of Grey’ and 'Boyfriend squirted partner with brown sauce after she refuses to stop reading Fifty Shades of Grey').

The culprit of the brown sauce incident needn't have worried. This is hardly sexually liberating erotica that will lead a generation of women into a kinky underworld;  sorry boys, but this is pure romance. With props.

You probably all know the story. Beautiful, tortured billionaire Christian Grey whisks idiotic unworldly student Anastasia Steele off her feet and showers her with lavish gifts. However there are obstacles; he has a Red Room of Pain and stalkerish tendencies (but that’s OK, because he’s attractive) and likes to hit women with things. After a lot of soul-searching, eye-rolling, lip-biting, earth-shattering and palm-twitching, Ana decides that, yes, he can hit her with things.

Of course, the writing is appalling. Sometimes, perhaps at the 64th mention of Ana’s 'inner goddess' (no exaggeration) or her observations such as, 'his sweatpants hang… in that way', you wonder if the whole thing is a big joke. Annoyingly, I even caught myself mirroring her inane internal monologues, exclaiming ‘Holy cow!’ and ‘Double crap!’ to myself at various points during the holiday.

But, beyond rime or reason, Fifty Shades is bizarrely addictive and I defy you not to get caught up in it. It provided us hours of fun on the beach as we read aloud some of the more ridiculous lines and debated who will play the immortal Christian Grey in the film. (I’d be keen to see Alexander Skasgard, Ryan Philippe, or ideally a young Michael Fassbender, but I appreciate the latter may be unrealistic…). Like it or loathe it, my brand new copy was literally falling apart and missing several pages after my two friends and I had each raced through the novel, and now looks embarrassingly well-thumbed.

The appeal here is the potent combination of classic Cindarella romance, a relentless stream of constant sex scenes and a ridiculous amount of hype. Who isn’t powerless to resist? If you haven’t already, stop fighting your curiosity and come join the club; read it, have fun and then bitch about it afterwards. As Ana herself says, "this is wrong... but holy hell is it erotic."

Actual rating: 2/10
Holiday read rating: 8.5/10

2. The Making of Us, Lisa Jewell

The Making of Us is a good old ‘Richard and Judy Book Club’ style novel, bought in haste from Waterstones thanks to the cover, which is plastered with praise from fairly reliable sources.

This is the uplifting tale of three lost souls who discover they all share the same sperm-donor father, who is now terminally ill. It was a relief to find real, three-dimensional characters and to discover that I could still feel real emotion, after my brain got such a spanking during Fifty Shades of Grey. I even shed real tears during this book, which I sailed through in a couple of days.

It’s an undemanding yet satisfying read, which I certainly enjoyed at the time and found myself caring about the complex characters, but now looking back I feel kind of ‘meh’ about it. It was lovely but forgettable; not the kind of book that leaves you feeling bereft when you finish, like the classic beach reads so often do (I'm really talking about One Day - I still miss Em and Dex).

Actual rating: 7/10
Holiday rating: 7/10

3. Hollywood Divorces, Jackie Collins

Hurrah, we're back to the filth!

Although a less experienced reader of trashy novels may assume they are all on a similarly low par, I can say wholeheartedly that as with any genre, there is good trash, and there is bad trash.

And with Jackie Collins - the undisputed Queen of the Bonkbuster - you are in excellent hands. She has been writing her inimitable stories of sex, scandal, fame and revenge for five decades and counting.

Ever since I picked up Hollywood Wives in a second hand book shop in India four years ago, no holiday has been complete without a Jackie Collins novel.

I’m not sure I should admit how many of her books I’ve now read, but each of them has been ridiculously entertaining and expertly paced. Invariably, there’s a superstar with a seedy past and/or a bitter vendetta against another Hollywood A-lister, plus at least three subplots that all collide in a dramatic showdown at a premiere.

Her finest work is definitely the old-school 1970s and '80s novels such as Hollywood Wives and The World is Full of Married Men, where lines such as ‘she’s a tough old broad...’ don’t seem quite so out of place.

This year’s choice, Hollywood Divorces, seems to be set around in the early noughties if the cultural references to Britney and Justin are anything to go by. The main character 'Lola Sanchez' – a ruthless Latina diva with a penchant for bad boys – is unashamedly based on Jennifer Lopez, and it’s fun to spot other thinly veiled portrayals of famous names.

Saying that, Hollywood Divorces probably wasn’t quite up to the usual gold standard of vintage Jackie Collins (usually there's at least one vaguely likeable character), but it was still my most enjoyable read of the holiday. With at least 20 more of her books still to get through, I think I’m sorted for the next few trips.

Actual rating: 4/10
Holiday read rating: 9/10 (The winner!)

4. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

As our holiday drew to a close, I thought I would finish with something noble, epic and firmly on my list of 'must reads'. I found this weather-beaten copy of Love in the Time of Cholera in a book lender's shop on Gili Trawangan in Indonesia and put down the deposit of 100,000 rupiah (about £7).

Three weeks later, on a rainy Tuesday afternoon on the Piccadilly Line, I finally finished it. This is a stunning piece of literature that completely immerses you in the sights, smells and sounds of turn of the century Columbia, and is quite unlike anything I've read before. But it's not one that hooks you from the first page or that can be raced through in between snorkelling and cocktails. Having not even reached the halfway point during our time on the Gilis, I sacrificed my deposit so I could find out whether hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza finally got his girl, Fermina Daza, after sixty years of unrequited love.

With its dense, lush, lyrical prose and very little dialogue, I realised that Love in the Time of Cholera had been somewhat missold as 'one of the greatest love stories of all time'. If that is what you are expecting, you may be disappointed; this is the slow, gradual unfolding of a lifetime of obsessive love, and as the novel approaches its climax, our romantic hero has become elderly, bald, toothless, sickly and has slept with more than 600 women.

But if you take your time and appreciate it in the way you would study a painting, for example, the language and insights on life and love can take your breath away. On several occasions, I came across a sentence so beautifully observed that I had to fold the corner down of the page so I could read it again and again: 

"Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no."

Or how about: 

"It is incredible how you can be happy for so many years, in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not." 

How this can even be judged against the book that brought us the immortal words "He's my very own Christian Grey flavoured Popsicle" is of course an outrage, but those are the rules. If we are comparing these two books based on their beach read factor and page-turnability, I'm afraid there's a clear winner...

Actual rating: 9/10
Holiday read rating: 4/10

Today I am ... dreaming of Indonesia

Forgive me, for I have sinned. It has been nearly four weeks since my last blog post. Tut tut. But it was all in the name of research. Your author has been on the ultimate escapist's adventure to the other side of the globe; the tropical paradise of Bali, Lombok and the Gili Islands.

And - although even the most remote of island beach cafes now carry hand-painted signs boasting of their WiFi access (my, how times have changed since my travelling days) - had I blogged from there, I would be inclined to say I hadn't quite grasped the true meaning of escapism.

I love London but I think sometimes we're all guilty of forgetting what a comparatively small, grey dot the city actually is in relation this huge, colourful, beautiful outside world. And on this trip, I remembered how simple it is to escape.

For my friends and I, it was simply a case of booking a flight on a whim as we passed STA Travel one Sunday afternoon a few months ago.  Three months and 17 hours later, I had completely switched off. It was that easy. It's amazing how quickly you adjust to a world where your most stressful decision is whether to order nasi goreng (fried rice) or mie goreng (fried noodles).

During our three weeks away, we saw three totally different ways of life, each of which is a world away from my life in London; here's how we embraced the Luxurious, the Backpacker, and the Cultural Indonesia...

Cultural

Bali may be the most commercialised of the three islands we visited, but venture inland to Ubud and the surrounding areas and you'll still find a culture rich with tradition and heritage. Within the artists' town of Ubud you'll be spoiled for choice with stunning temples, Indonesian cookery classes, local galleries, yoga classes and forest treks aplenty. But the real treats are buried deep in the countryside. Arrange to stay with a local family in one of the island's many friendly, cheap homestays. Most just offer bed and breakfast, but in the village where we stayed (Wayan's Bali Homestay), we must have been the only Westerners for miles, and we were whole-heartedly embraced into the community, where Wayan's grandmother, father and grown-up children all still live in neighbouring houses.

This is the real deal; the village is buzzing by 7am but by then, the cockerels and dogs outside your window will, like you, have already been up for hours. Wayan and his wonderful family gave us Balinese makeovers, home-cooked local specialities, took us on a walk to see daily life in the rice paddies and invited us to the cremation of an elderly relative, a colourful and communal affair attended by the whole village. On an island which in parts is fast becoming Australia's answer to the Costa del Sol, it was inspiring to see such a simple, old-fashioned way of life where home, family and community still come first.

Luxurious

Saying that, there's only so long three girls on holiday can share a cold shower with an entire extended family. Craving an authentic and sociable holiday experience, I had some initial reservations (no pun intended) about staying in luxurious, honeymooner-friendly hotels. However as I reclined on our futon in a silky hotel dressing gown and poured myself a free vodka from the complimentary decanter in our room, I realised I could probably make my peace with fresh, clean towels, open-air baths under the stars and complementary sunset massages...

The trick was to alternate the hotel stays in between the more basic accommodation, so we preserved that childlike excitement when we arrived at our villa and dived into the oversized beds like Macauley Culkin in Home Alone 2 (great film).

We felt like celebrities when we rocked up at eco-friendly Uma Ubud in the lush, green highlands of Ubud, Bali, a boutique collection of tranquil villas. Our backpacks and girly screams ('Oh my god, the shower!') quickly blew our cover of being seasoned five star globe-trotters.

Quinci Villas in Lombok was rather less subtle, looking straight out of the Elle travel pages with a blinging infinity pool overlooking the private beach - the perfect place to catch up on missed tanning hours from our time in the Bali homestay.

And finally, 24 hours at the Chedi Club in Bali have now ruined me for life. Our night in heaven was an early birthday gift for my friend, courtesy of her mum (thanks Mrs Cooper!). This is the kind of place I could have only dreamt of staying; an intimate, secluded retreat hidden in the middle of the rice paddies, with its own lotus pond and family of black swans.

Again, we may have disturbed the serenity of the environment with our enthusiasm. This was the last night of the holiday before our flight back to reality. Not knowing when, if ever, I would return to a hotel like this in my lifetime, we were on a mission to make the most of it. We dutifully slathered our weather-beaten skin and hair with the hotel's indulgent products, filled our bags with snacks and cans from the free mini-bar, got our laundry done and enjoyed the free afternoon tea in the aviary. They practically had to drag us from there to the airport kicking and screaming.

Backpacker 

And then there was Gili Trawangan - party island paradise. There are no cars, just horse and carts, but best of all - it was here that we found the one, elusive thing that had evaded us for much of the trip: People! Who weren't all couples!

Not that I didn't love our 'romantic' candle-lit dinners for three, but we were so ready for the Gilis by the time we arrived. The main beach on Gili Trawangan is picture perfect, and full of decent beach huts which you don't need to book in advance (watch out for the cockroaches though). The turquoise sea is full of turtles, clownfish and lots more, just waiting to be discovered.

Attracting Aussie surfers, Indonesian reggae enthusiasts, Singaporean girls-on-tour and a LOT of divers, Gili T is rather like I imagine Koh Tao in Thailand might have been a decade ago; rustic and ramshackle, but lively and exciting.

The famous party nights (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) took me back to my University days, where you knew exactly which bar to head to on each night of the week. And rather like Freshers Week, the people you meet on the first night will continue to haunt you for the rest of your trip, popping up in restaurants, the sea, maybe even your flight home.

This is a tiny island, which you can easily walk or cycle around (we opted for renting bicycles, the first time I've been on one since I was about 12. It's not true what they say about never forgetting how to ride one). And after six nights on Gili T - the longest we spent anywhere during our trip - it is also the place I found hardest to say goodbye to.

Back to reality

It was quite a culture shock emerging from the tube station at rush hour like a confused time-traveller, after our epic flight home. In my maxi-dress and backpack, I walked back to my flat against a tide of commuters and drizzle. The next day, it was back to business as usual. 

I wouldn't say I've had post-holiday blues; it's more of a post-holiday daze which I still haven't quite snapped out of. Did it really all happen? Was it just a dream? Then I notice the sand still in my wallet and smile. My battle wounds of straplines, bites and bruises may be fading, but as long as we've got the memories, we'll always have Indonesia.