All the travelling I did last year gave me a new determination to explore more of my own country, and especially London as when you live in a place it is very easy to dismiss tourists and completely miss the reasons they have come to visit! Some fun things I have done recently:

• Premiership football at The Valley: We took an American colleague to see some real football, and watched Charlton Athletic beat Birmingham City 2-0. Not the greatest game ever, but an excellent experience and I was pleasantly surprised that tickets were much easier to obtain than I thought they would be.
• A curry in Brick Lane: Not quite what I was expecting as having dodged the many touts and determined all the curry houses seemed pretty much the same, a local shopkeeper came out to urge us away from the main drag and onto the family owned restaurants in the side streets. The restaurant we ended up at was generally very good, but unfortunately my chicken tikka masala was so mild as to be a little bland.
• Exploring the South Bank and the City: Strolling down the South Bank from Westminster bridge, into the historic City and St. Paul’s, and then down the Strand made for a lovely Sunday tour of some famous landmarks, and the discovery of a well-stocked second hand book market.
• 100 Club: Live music in the retro surroundings of an Oxford St basement.
• From modern culture, we then visited the amazing British Museum. It’s so huge you can never hope to see more than a tiny portion of its many in one visit galleries, so we restricted ourselves to the most famous—Ancient Greece and Elgin’s Marbles and a quick tour of Egypt to see the Rosetta Stone. On my one previous visit I did an excellent “Highlights Tour”, run by one of the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable tour guides I’ve ever met, and even on this second visit, my memory of the first tour made all the exhibits so much more alive somehow.