Dublinia: London - Trip report

Where to start??!

I think I shall just do a splurge of text summarising parts of the trip and then load up a few photos at the end which capture the atmosphere.

As you know this was a "working holiday" because I was helping Irish artist Pigsy present his work at The Other Art Fair. First things first, the exhibition was a tremendous success! We calculated that between Enid, myself and Pigsy we conversed with approx. 600 people across the weekend. Everyone loved his paintings and really seemed to connect personally with Pigsy and his story. And yes, he made some sales! But more importantly, he got offers from galleries to come show - in London and further afield.

It has to be said it was a lot of hard work from start to finish, but it was a good bit of fun too. The three of us, we make a good team. We were delighted with the results and we had some craic getting them too.

Eats

We ate in a number of different places and I must say all were either good or very good:

We had some nice hamburgers in Byron Hamburgers on the first night when I arrived off the Tube from the airport.

A superb little find was the café in Le Cordon Bleu culinary school - very close to our hotel - and only the best scrambled eggs I've ever had in my life :-) And the bread. The bread!!! Doughy with an intensely kicky yeast flavour.

Marco Pierre White - we ate here on the last night to celebrate a successful weekend. I had the most amazing prawns and a good malbec. Service was excellent too

All Stars - this was a fun place! A small 1950's style bowling alley with a cool restaurant and bar. Pretty good food to boot! I got the crab chowder.

Boozer! Local boozer! We found a local pub. The Queen's Larder was a nicely dingy and authentic London pub :-)

Accommodation

It was panic stations when just four days out from our departure our airbnb cancelled on us. Can you believe that?!! Thankfully Ciaran found us an alternative at that short notice. We stayed in the Grange in Bloomsbury and we could not have had a better location. It was literally 60 seconds from the venue which was exceptionally handy for running back to get supplies of information sheets and business cards when stocks ran low.

Visitors!

It was great to see our London family on Sunday. Special mention to Jem and Kristina who travelled in from outside London with their three month old baby for the meet up. So great to meet baby Arthur who is absolutely adorable. As well as being a little cutie, Enid and I worked out that he is our youngest (or newest born) of our SECOND cousins - out of about 15 other second cousins. We have a big family lol.

Nice to see Ciaran and Enid's friend Ronan. He was working in London for the weekend and took the opportunity to pop in to see the Pigsy exhibition.

And very nice to meet the lovely Aisling and lovely Catherine. So kind to come support and say hi.

All in all I had an incredible weekend. I simply cannot say more than that. Oh I can actually! Thank you Enid and Pigsy for bringing me along for the ride. I am super proud to be part of the Pigsy story.

Edit. One of my regular blog readers has been on to point out that Arthur is actually my first cousin once removed rather than my second cousin. What would I do without you Cousin Kasey?! :)))))