We’ve gone to Coal for breakfast a couple of times now, most recently last weekend.  With pancakes and maple syrup, eggs and bacon (£4.85) and a better than average hot chocolate, it’s definitely a step up in quality compared to the breakfast menus of your standard English pubs.  On our last trip, they also gave us two vouchers for £10 off when you spend £20 on food, to be used by November 30.

So we went back tonight, and Matt had a Prime Scotch Beefburger (£8.95) and I had a Sicilian Pizza (£6.25), and our friend – who was fitting in goodbyes to several people in one evening – had already eaten, so she didn’t eat at all and so we didn’t make the £20 threshold.  So now we have five £10 vouchers to be used by November 30. 

Anyway, I’m getting side-tracked.  Coal Grill and Bar isn’t super-fancy, but it’s a nice place to eat.  It seems warm there when it’s raining, but that may just be a psychological side-effect of the fact they’ve got decorative coal-behind-orange-plastic in the walls.  The Sicilian Pizza was a fantastic mix of olives, salami, parma ham and mozzarella.  And it was delicious… even to a tired 27-year-old with a mouth ulcer who was once again saying goodbye. 

We’ll go back again – who knows, maybe even sometime in the 20 days left in November.

Tash

There’s so many shows to see in London that we’ve adopted a policy of buying the cheapest tickets available.  While this technically does mean that we can afford to see more, it often means that we’re unable to see less of the individual shows.  Last night, we were once again up the back, near the follow-spots, and the angle of the ceiling meant that we missed some of the balcony scenes.

But while we needed binoculars (on hire for 50p) to see the actor’s expressions, the dancing was enthusiastic and the voices were superb and there was song after song I knew.  The second act, in particular, packed an emotional punch and I found myself crying alongside Maria at Anton’s death.

50 years on, the language of West Side Story, with all it’s ‘buddy-boys’ and ‘daddios’, is somewhat dated.  But in a city where every week there’s a story in the papers of a teenage stabbing, the plot is sadly still all too relevant.

Tash

Still, it was great to be there, to be given the official booklet (A Guide to Queueing for the Championships) and the stickers that confirmed we had.  After 5pm, grounds passes are £14, which I thought was okay as at this time of year, there’s plenty of daylight (and thus tennis) left after 5.

Our grounds tickets didn’t let us into Centre Court, but we found seats around Court 18, where we watched the Australian Guccione lose to Bozoljac from Serbia and then the British Mel South lose to Alyona Bondarenko from the Ukraine.  Even after one day of play, the grass on the court was beginning to show a bit of wear and tear.

After watching the two games, we found a picnic table and shared an expensive burger with a bottle of beer and a glass of wine, while watching Lleyton Hewitt (who won) on the big screen.

The weather’s been surprisingly good for Wimbledon this year – though it did suddenly pour down for half an hour on Friday afternoon, as if to remind us not to get complacent.  This is England after all.

Tash