IF this wasn't a family blog, I'd tell you exactly what I thought of the above picture. But it is so I can't. Who needs a city view during a stay in London when you can feast your eyes on such a protuberance?
Here, Trish from Mum's Gone To, explains more about said nose and other highlights of visiting the capital with a teenager in tow.
'City view' it said, when I booked the hotel. Indeed. We could just about see some of the landmark London buildings but only when the eye travelled past the glaringly obvious sight of Waterloo Station. If our son had been six again and fond of choo-choos then this would be kiddie heaven. Pretty cool at night though.
Amazingly the double-glazing was so thick that we couldn't hear a thing from our room on the 12th floor. Yet the positives of the Park Plaza County Hall hotel definitely outweighed the negatives. It's very much a family friendly hotel. Most rooms, like ours, had a lounge area with sofa bed and a kitchenette with microwave and coffee machine. Not sure why there were scales in the bathroom. The last thing you want to be doing on holiday is getting hung up about the effect of those extra croissants you managed to secrete into a napkin at breakfast.
Finding activities that will interest and amuse older children or young teenagers can often be very challenging for parents. In an effort to find something different for our 13 year old son who has 'done' the Science Museum, the Eye and the London Dungeon on previous visits, I found a couple of activities for a February trip to the capital.
Our son has a typical boyish fascination for all things gruesome, so was very keen to see Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum. I wasn't so keen after I'd seen the cost of admission. I managed to find some online deals: a 20% discount voucher from Discount Britain or 10% off if you buy the tickets online from Ripleys itself. I decided, oddly enough, to go for the 10% option to save queuing in the freezing cold. Bad decision. I waved my online ticket at the woman on the door, expecting to be ushered through, only to be told I still had to queue with everyone else. I seethed for the rest of the day at my wasted 10%. Note to other parents: use your Tesco vouchers or other two for one offers that are often given out at supermarkets!
My lad loved the museum and I admit there were some great exhibits – the Swarovski crystal covered Mini, the shrunken heads and an interesting collection of tribal cod-pieces. There was also a photo opportunity with a chastity belt which I declined. As the teenager had the camera that day I felt I could hardly ask him to do the honours while his mother straddled a huge pair of metal knickers. (Ed's note, could you not have straddled the nose instead?)
Some of the exhibits, though entertaining, were copies of originals or dummies of people from history with goggly eyes or large appendages like the chap pictured above. It was an upmarket P. T. Barnum's. Didn't he invent the phrase "There's a sucker born every minute"? Boys aged eight to 14 will adore every second.
The other activity I booked in advance was a BBC tour around the TV Centre.At less than half the price of Ripley's Believe it or Not, £9.50 for adults, £7 for children, this seemed like excellent value for money. Children have to be nine years or over to go on the tour, but there are also CBBC tours for children aged seven and over.
The highlights for us were:
1. Looking at the studio of Mock the Week as they were rehearsing their 'off the cuff' answers….
2. Some of our group having a go at presenting the weather and a news bulletin.
3. Sitting in the men's dressing room for Strictly Come Dancing (unfortunately empty at the time).
4. Getting the low-down on diva celebrities like J-Lo who insisted she be given an all-white dressing room. Yes she could, but this is the Beeb so she had to pay for it herself.
5. Seeing Eastender Archie's blood-splattered jumper.
I can't recommend the tour highly enough: so informative, such a laugh and great value.
A visit to London is never complete without a theatre trip. When the Lion King doesn’t excite any more, try tempting your teen with a performance of Avenue Q. It's like a musical Sesame Street for adults (recommended 12 plus) I had heard good things about it but wasn't familiar with the songs.
We managed to get fantastic front row dress circle seats with Lastminute.com (though in hindsight I should have logged onto my new Kidstart account to get a little bit of money back too) and the show was very funny and deliciously rude. The mix of puppets and human characters made it a real treat.
Son laughed like a drain and declared it the best musical he's ever seen and "so much better than the other ones you drag me to see".
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