I got back on the train, listening to German tourists being rude about London and carried on my journey.

One stop further up is Lancaster Gate. I've been through here only once before.

A large chunk of my degree was paid for temping for a large company that held its annual Christmas Conference here. It's a very male-orientated company, built around 'direct marketing sales', which is jargon for 'people knocking on your door and bullying you into buying stuff'. One year I was invited to the conference as the guest of the Edinburgh team manager.

T'was surreal experience. Firstly, even by eight in the morning the Glasgow team had run up a bar tab of over eight grand and were fighting with each other, fists clenched around wads of fifty pound notes over who was paying for what. Even at hotel bar prices that's ridiculous and one of them was later hospitalised with alcohol poisioning. It seemed to be some form of badge of honour for the Scots guys to outdrink the English.

In the actual conference hall itself, of the 700 attendees, I was one of only three women. I walked in and felt the eyes of all of them turn on me, and you could feel the testerone level rise. I'd spent much of the previous three years travelling around the country from hotel to hotel teaching pretty much everyone in the room how to use the companies new EPOS system on a two day course I'd helped develop. It was one of my more entertaining jobs. The guys I taught are of my father's generation, not comfortable with being in a classroom with a computer, not happy about being taught by a young, blonde girl, and of course let loose in a hotel overnight with expenses. As well as learning a lot about teaching methods, I also learnt a lot more about ego-wrangling, and developing a nifty two-step in order to keep out of the clutches of randy middle-aged salemen. I strongly suspected that there was some kind of book open within the teams to see who could bed me. None of them won, despite the late night knocks on my door, the stuffed animals or seductive notes. I stamped on any number of footsies under the dinner table... I learnt a lot on how women travelling on business are treated as well.

And so, with the book still open, there I was stuck in a room with bloody all of them, all tipsy on champagne cocktails for breakfast. It's no exaggeration to say that after the speechifying, and more alcohol, I was literally mobbed in the hallway by several hundred guys wanting a Christmas kiss and a hug. It was terrifying...a stampede of drunken double glazing salesmen advanced towards me with a hungry look in their eye...I had bruises by the end of the day. Like many a gal before me, I took refuge in the ladies, but hell those management skills have certainly come in handy over the years.

There were other women at the function, only they were 'dancers' dressed in teeny little santa outfits, who mingled between tables, and they had a different look in their eyes. They stared daggers at me and the only two other women there as we wouldn't be tucking a Christmas tip into their white furry garters. Women police women. A very very odd day...and not necessarily an experience I'd care to repeat.


new manicure...


From here one more stop to an even more exclusive shopping area, Bond Street.  Bond Street has no surface building of it's own, disgorging instead into a shopping centre.



Great place for shopping for shoes. There's a button shop nearby that sells incredible things from 17thC onwards. It's one of those incredibly old fashioned shops where everything is piled on shelves in brown cardboard boxes, run by a tiny old chap who knows every piece of stock amongst the thousand upon thousands of tiny items in the inventory. But we don't hang about, instead we go back downstairs & switch to the Jubilee Line for Waterloo for the trip to Bank.

Now many of you may indeed scratch your heads at this choice, as at Bond Street we were already on the Central Line, a mere 5 stops from Bank in a straight line; why travel three stops Southwards and change lines? Because, from Waterloo one can use The Drain, the colloquial term for the Waterloo and City Line, coloured a fetching shade of aqua on the map. I've already 'done' Waterloo, so getting to Bank via the Central Line would mean I'd not ever travel The Drain as it consists of a link between precisely two stops: it goes only between Waterloo and Bank and is the shortest line on the network...and it has travelators!

Once I return to the depths of the Underground, in need of an earlyish night after all this walking, an obsessive thought crept into my head - it was only one stop down the Northern Line to Euston...that would take out both the Euston Stations...before I'd really thought about it, I found my feet taking me on the Northern Line escalator.

At Euston there's no name marker to say 'Euston', just a bloody great roundel in the ceiling; that will have to suffice.

I bother woman who isn't as harried looking as the others that rush past to the escalator. She seems baffled by the request but dutifully points the camera and as she takes the shot I see she presses the 'off' button rather than the shutter. I see the camera switch itself to sleep...however, duty done, she seems eager to get on her way and stop having to deal with the pink haired nutter so I just smile, take the camera back and say 'thank you'...I then get an attack of nerves; all around me people are rushing homewards, or stand about finishing phone calls before they go out of reception underground. It must take me a good three minutes to summon the nerve to ask someone else, but even though he too seems baffled that I should want such a thing as a picture of me under the Euston Underground roundel he does the job, even getting down on one knee to frame a better shot.