By pure fluke, I managed to be paying attention at the right time to (I think) get a picture of Southend Pier.

Unlike last time, I actually remember getting through Heathrow.
(checking back to my diary of a couple of years ago, it looks like the memory loss happened after the fact)
I did spot an escalator/ramp combo running down from Passport Control to Baggage Claim which seemed familiar, and a Biosecurity Check room which matched up to a memory which had come adrift from any context.
Things went smoothly; The only thing they wanted to know was where I’d come in from, and biosecurity/customs appears to work on the honour system, as the only person in the bag-scanning hall seemed to be taking a shortcut to somewhere else.

Rather than navigate the Underground at 6pm, I’d booked in for a night at an airport hotel one terminal over, so a short train trip got me there. (The Heathrow Express to Paddington wasn’t running, so I was even more glad to not be heading into London)
Yotel Heathrow is convenient, small, and oddly purple.
Even had a violet light in the room.

It was small enough that you had to plan a move or two ahead in terms of making space to do things in.
Comfy enough for a night’s sleep though, and they have ‘free’ coffee/hot chocolate.

I stayed at an AirBnB for the next few days, working on the theory that I really just needed somewhere to be jetlagged in for a while.
Turns out that when you don’t have a convention to go to, and thus an external schedule to keep, jetlag can last a whole lot longer. The humid weather didn’t help.

The AirBnB experience was, I think, a lot like living in a haunted house.
There were other people living in other rooms in the place, but as they were mostly out, I never saw them, or only saw them once before they moved on. Essentially, it was an empty house where things moved when I wasn’t looking & there were noises in the night.
Not sure on the whole AirBnB experience; This place was clearly being run as a hostel/hotel/BnB by the owner, who didn’t live on-site, and who I’m guessing didn’t visit that often. A lot of minor maintenance issues, like a student flat on it’s way out where nobody can be bothered fixing things & the landlord isn’t contactable.
That said, the bed worked, the WiFi worked, the system for getting in worked (combination lock-box on the front door with the key in it, key to the room left in the door to said room, and a message from the owner telling you the combination & the room name – Mine was Piccadilly Circus, with a replica of the official street sign on the door), and it was close to the DLR.

The other thing it was close to was Greenwich, right across the Thames, and accessible by a walking tunnel dating back to 1902.

There’s a dome to the right of the ship, which is the roof of the access stairway/lift for the Greenwich side.
Just behind me is the Old Royal Naval College, which you can see they’ve just finished repairing after that spaceship crashed into it in the movie Thor: The Dark World.

And this is the view from the other side.
Near as I can tell, based on the road layouts & house designs, where I was staying used to be a wharf complex (the road is named Empire Wharf), with warehouses & all that, and got redeveloped into residential. All of the houses around were done in roughly the same style, even if they weren’t part of the same building, and when you crossed one of the roads running around the perimeter of the Isle of Dogs, that suddenly changes, and there’s a lot more variety in age & design.
I need, or at least want, to do some more digging into this, to see how the area developed over the years.

So, stuff I did?

For the first while, “had a bad time due to jetlag, with maybe a minor lurgh of some sort” would cover it.
Did do some tourist things, like the Museum of London Docklands (which was fascinating until they got to an entire wing dedicated to the wranglings of committees for development from the 70’s onward) and the British Museum (which I’ll be going back to, as it was just too humid a day to be in a crowded place).

After a few days I moved to a hostel in Greenwich, St. Christopher’s, which is over a pub.
This becomes important later.
This was my first ‘bed in a dormitory’ stay of the trip, and indeed my first of that type of stay in a very long time.
I’ve stayed in hostels before, but had gone with private rooms. This wasn’t an option here.
The setup at St. Christopher’s was pretty good; You enter through the bar, but there’s a prox-card door to get into the hostel proper, another to open the door to the room, a specifically assigned bed, and a locker big enough that I could have fitted Big Red in there twice over without issue, in the form of a rolling metal cage which took up half of the under-bed space, with the other half being the locker for the other bunk. I got the top bunk, and it was pretty comfy, and also under a window, which was a useful thing, because holy crapballs  did that place get hot. Even with a pedestal fan going and the windows open it was still too hot to need the provided duvet most nights, and I only closed the window when absolutely needed, such as heavy rain.
On the subject of that window … Yeah, the pub was loud. To the extent that there was a jar of earplugs in each room, provided for free, and on Friday & Saturday nights they were really needed, as the loud music didn’t stop until 2am. Rest of the time it only ran 10pm to Midnight.
This place had piped music running constantly, not at ear-splitting volume, but at a noticeable level, even at 7am during breakfast.

With no particular demands on my time, I just sort of relaxed into being in the UK.
Got a cellphone number, wandered semi-aimlessly around using the Underground, and the River Buses, and my own two feet, and didn’t really do much of great consequence or importance.

Also, there was a crow mooching about at one of the River Bus stop.

The dorm experience did mean that I met people, which was kind of nice.

• There was the Indian IT Guy in the bed below mine, who’d only just arrived and was plowing straight into work & getting himself set up
• The woman from New Zealand in one of the other top bunks, who was transitioning between holiday & working holiday
• The English guy below her, who seemed to sleep most of the day & go out at night. Maybe he was working; It’s unclear, and he was hardly ever there & awake to be asked
• The South African chef in the last lower bunk, who really did sleep all day.
• The automotive mechanic in the bed above him, who … was very confident in the things he was demonstrably wrong about, such as which showers worked, or how the complicated skylight windows were operated. This made his pronouncements on Brexit somewhat harder to take seriously.

The UK’s vote to Stay in the EU or not happened while I was at St. Christopher’s, and … I didn’t see that result coming.
Also didn’t see the four main promises of the ‘Leave’ campaign vanishing within the next day coming; It was obvious that some of them were total bollocks, but the speed with which the clawbacks & technicalities & so on happened was impressive.
No idea what the end result of that will be.

I’m keeping my eye on the Scottish Independence Movement. Having only just started to make use of being an EU Citizen, I’d like to keep making use of it, and I can’t do that if the UK exits. If Scotland goes independent & stays in the EU, however, and if I can put myself in a place to become a Scottish Citizen when that happens, it seems worth doing. 

On the weekend, Gulo T. came to town, so we did Tourist Things!
Specifically, the London Eye.

There was a festival of sorts going on, called ‘Udderbelly’ ‘Underbelly’, and in the background here is an inflatable purple cow, lying on it’s back, containing a stage. {edit: the Festival is Underbelly, the purple cow stage is Udderbelly}

 

There was also a festival happening in Greenwich, the Greenwich Docklands International Festival,

… and we saw part of one act; A thing called Block, which had people doing dance & circus acrobatics using big movable blocks to make & re-make their stage space. They were doing things like building walls, or getting people walking on top of blocks which were being put in place to make a path as they moved.