Feburary was on a leap year this year, so it was an ideal year to celebrate the civil partnership of my husband and I, which took place on 29th February 2008, especially since we had just officially converted to full marriage at the start of this year. To celebrate, we we took a long weekend (The 29th falling on the Saturday.) in London. We booked a holiday with Caledonian Travel- a coach ride down on the Friday, stay at hotel for two nights, then the coach back up on Sunday.

The coach trip was designed for people who wanted to take in West End shows in London on the Saturday, but we weren’t really interested in that. We hadn’t been in London for ages, and wanted to meet up with old friends. This was booked as soon as we converted the civil partnership to marriage in January, before we started seeing how serious the Covid-19 pandemic might be.

By the time we were getting the coach on the Friday, there is already talk of “social distancing”, and people on the coach are already starting to get worried. The back of the coach is cold, we need to keep warm! My granny’s needing to keep warm, because.. you know what they say about this virus and older people! When we stop at a couple of classic motorway services, the whole vibe is of uncertanty: some people are definately self-enforcing social distancing, whilst others are looking bewildered at those self-enforcing social distancing around them.

As the coach passes the M25, the coach sound system tunes to Radio 2, which I haven’t heard for some time, and it appears to my ears to sound like BBC Radio 1 in the 1980s, with many of the same daytime DJs.

In fact, it goes further. If you told me in, say, 1989 that in the bleak early months of 2020, I’d be on a coach going down to London with a bunch of Glesga Wifies, and we’d be listening to Ozzy Osbourne being played on Radio 2- with flippin’ Elton John singing along!!!!- I’d be wondering what you were on.

And so, we arrive at our destination: the Britannia International hotel in Canary Wharf. I’ve not been anywhere near Canary Wharf in the past 20 years, and it’s changed. A lot. How much I find out in the hours after we check in the hotel.

Outside, the hotel looks pretty much like everything that seems to have happened to Canary Wharf in the last 20 years: sleek, brutalist stunt architecture spiraling to the skies, with a car park in the basement. No outside indication of whether a building might be composed of offices, trendy flats, hotel rooms, or a combination of all of the above.

Inside the hotel, however, is a different story: chandeliers, flock wallpaper, luxurious carpets, and generally the sort of plush fittings one might expect from an Edwardian-era hotel in Brighton. The disconnect between inside and outside was particularly pronounced when we went down to have dinner. (A very nice buffet selection.) The dining area and ajoining bar area have extensive views across South Dock, allowing us, in our Edwardian splendour, to look across an artificial dock, with ducks and seagulls fighting over detrius, towards the modernist architecture of the offices of JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley. Even without seeing anything, one can feel the rumble and trundle of the nearby Docklands Light Railway as it arrives at a stop between the two buildings.

After dinner, obviously neither of us are planning to go out on the town. I decide to venture out for a brief time to find out where the bank-machines are- I’ll need some English currency, just in case. A quick Google Maps search told me there was two bank machines within easy reach. However, once I descended to ground level, and ventured outside the hotel’s doors, it became clear that the geography of Canary Wharf was not for the faint-hearted. Winding, twisting roads, disrupting my sense of direction, in a manner not unlike the twisting lanes of Barcelona’s Cuitat Vella.

Wandering along a road, I bumped into a lady who was in a similar bank-machine search mission to me. She actually worked in a nearby office, and needed cash for pizzas ‘n’ beer for an office late night session, which made me feel less alone. We were able to find a bank-machine- it was actually nearby, and we both felt relieved. She was back off to her office, mission accomplished, and I went off on a brief random walk.

Ironically, through this random walk, I stumbled upon the other bank-machine- and it was a Royal Bank of Scotland, no less. It was attached to a Tesco Metro. When I went to it the next day, I realised that I was at the effective border of Canary Wharf.

The first night, I walked through Canary Wharf, and was instantly struck at how small it was: almost like Manhattan or Signapore, compressed into a small village. The second night, when I got some supplies at the Tesco, I realised that this is where the rest of the Isle of Dogs get their supplies.

Otherwise, when I walked around Canary Wharf, I got the feeling of a Sundown Town, where people basically ran off from their offices, whenever they could, to the safety of their homes. There appeared to be a big pub in Canada Square, with the audible pumping of techno and braying of Hooray Henry’s, but I certainly wouldn’t want to venture there, and most people walking around seemed, sensibly, to agree. The rest of the place was filled with public architecture such as this, which although impressive, didn’t seem to be communaly friendly.

In the morning, after breakfast, we wandered around Canada Square, scarcely more than a block from the hotel. Already we could see social distancing in effect in the second biggest financial district in one of the world’s capitals of finance. Even then, it was still a bit busy, but people were keeping well apart, and the number of folks wearing surgical masks over their faces was noticeable. We went into a shopping mall, which we entered via Canary Wharf’s tube station, a Norman Foster construction, entered through a snail like canopy reminiscent of Foster’s earlier work for the Bilbao Metro. The station has been likened to a “cathedral”, but for me it felt like taking a long escalator ride down into a hipster aircraft hanger.

Either side of the huge mezzanine were entrances to large underground shopping malls. We wandered around Jubilee Place for a bit before stopping at the food court for some coffee. (You could tell it was an upscale food court, because it had Five Guys!!) Along the way, we found a little computer printer, reminiscent of a thermal print from the 8-bit days, which printed a little piece of literature when you pressed a button. (Mine was “Birches” by Robert Frost.) We also noted that in the toilets was a newly installed hand santiser station.

After coffee, we crossed over to another huge shopping mall, this time under 1 Canada Square, before taking the Dockland Light Railway (Which does not actually feel that light at all.) to Limehouse to meet friends.

Their house overlooks the Thames, which turns out to be a very busy river, with speedboats whizzing around, and a local river bus to and from the centre. Apparently Sir Ian McKellan is a nearby neighbour, a fact which took me back to the first time I visited London as an adult, and buying my first ever issue of Gay Times- from a news stall of all places. (Proudly going up there and saying “Can I have a Gay Times, please?” was one the more pivotal moments of my life.) At the time McKellan had recently publicly come out, and was campaiging against Section 28 as part of Stonewall. A very different time then to now, where I’m here with my husband and friends, and we’re sipping rose wine, me standing barefoot on a balcony, watching the boats go by on the Thames, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf looming in the distance.

Although the wind was a bit chilly, Spring was definately in the air. Afterwards, went down the riverside to catch a riverboat into town, specifcally Embankment. Social distancing was defintately in the air too, with people carefully selecting seats not-too-close to each other, and a few more face masks in evidence. Part of the way there, we finally got to see The Shard up close.

Our plan was to go to “Gay is the Word” bookstore in Bloomsbury, (my suggestion) and then onto the nearby British Museum (his). Upon arriving at Embankment, I had a bit of an autistic meltdown, preferring to get to “Gay is the Word” via the nearby Tube station to Russell Square, whereas my husband wanted to get there by bus. I’m not even sure why I had a meltdown- it was a lovely sunny day- maybe it was that I knew how to get there by Tube rather than bus, and I knew the area around Russell Square. However, we solved this by making it into a game: let’s see who gets there first.

(One thing I had learned by this point: the Oyster Card is effectively redundant. Last few times I was in London, I had used it for public transport and had grown to love it’s simplicity- efffectively a contactless payment system for transport. Just put credit on the card, and you can just wave it at any ticket barrier- which pretty much is any public transport in London- and it lets you through. It just works. And so before I went down to London this time, I had installed the app on my phone, which is capable of contactless payment. However, when I started using the app on public transport, I found that it basically detected that my phone does contactless payment, and switched to the phone’s default contactless system instead. So, I didn’t need the Oyster app, or card. I could just use my phone instead. Which is what I ended up doing.)

As expected- if nothing else, I know the central Tube system of London like the back of my hand- I got there first by about 10 minutes. I texted Dave when I arrived at “Gay is the Word”.

There is a reason I wanted to go there. I had ventured inside the shop back in the day, fresh copy of my first Gay Times in my satchel, but although I wandered around, I didn’t quite appreciate it. This was partly because I hadn’t appreciated the value of radical indepedent bookshops. (I had a similar problem appreciating, for example, Caledonia Books in Glasgow.) The turning point for me was coming to Category is Books in Glasgow, and then later Lighthouse Books in Edinburgh. One can easily glide through places like this, like it’s a small version of Waterstones, but when one realises that this place is also a space, then it becomes more than a bookshop.

Today, the shop, which was quite busy, reminded me, in terms of dimensions and how people interacted, mostly of Lighthouse Books. Of course, this shop does have history. If was from here that Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners was based in 1984-1985. This campaign of solidarity was famously fictionalised in the 2014 movie “Pride”, which bookends a period of time between the 1984 and 1985 Pride marches in London.

My husband was on that 1985 march. And at the time, he was wondering why all these coal miners unions were joining the Pride march. Watching the movie in the Glasgow Film Theatre at the time of release, he understood. As did I.

As is usual for historically-based dramas of this type, the pre-credits text informed us of What Happened Next. Most important of this was that the Labour party committed to LGBT+ rights, and the biggest vote, the vote which tipped the scales, was the votes of the coal-miner unions.

In short, by the time Tony Blair was swept to government in 1997, his party was already, and for a long time, committed to a policy, which had resulted from a campaign originating from this book-shop.

One thing that I did see whilst browsing around the store was a paperback copy of “Faggots and their Friends Between the Revolutions” by Larry Mitchell. This was a book I was alerted to by someone on social media, and there was a PDF of the original on the internet, but it was something else to hold a copy of it in my hand.

After a quick visit to the British Museum, and a pizza in Soho, we met up with our old friend Rajan, and caught with things in a Starbucks on Tottenham Court. The whole area around Centrepoint had changed almost unrecognisably since I was last there . It was great to see Rajan after all those years, and to see how well he was doing.

After that, it was a trip to the Central Line of the Underground to Bank, which was as crowded and maze-like as I remember it, to get a DLR back to Canary Wharf. The journey in the DLR was strange- it started off in an underground tunnel, then suddenly speeded out of the tunnel onto an elevated rail-track. It was like being shot out of a cannon! Again, on the way back, there were lots of people nervously social distancing and wearing masks. We arrived back in the hotel just in time to chill out, and go to bed.

The next morning, we got up and packed, and I looked over the skyline from the window of our room, seeing the Shard, which wasn’t even there the last time I was in London. Would I see it again soon? As our coach took us back up to Scotland, amid reports of rising Coronavirus cases on social media, I did wonder…