London with more dash than cash

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. In this post the family is on the hunt for cheap London entertainment after discovering the public toilets by the London Eye can only be entered for 50p... Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs). I also publish an interview every week with people who live or work in Islington at islingtonfacesblog.com - there's a prize for the 100th follower.

London Eye fabulousness.

I'm lucky to live in London so have an endless variety of exhibitions, shows and trips to enjoy. However it's an expensive city - one of the world's most expensive cities, along with Oslo (Norway), Geneva and Zurich (Switzerland). We may not have run away inflation, like Zimbabwe had until recently, but my income is modest so day trips have to be planned carefully.
Result: lots of opportunities to explore all that London has to offer for free (not just museum, gallery and the Royal Festival Hall's free toilet facilities!).

This weekend a friend was celebrating her 50th birthday in a lovely way. Her husband had organised groups of friends and family to surprise her at various London sightseeing hot spots. I was particularly lucky to get a trip on the London Eye. It was a glorious sunny day and the half hour in the pod whizzed past as presents were opened and the Emirates stadium, Wembley, Crystal Palace mast, Ali Palace, Parliament and the MI5 building spotted... And then we said goodbye and off Debora went to her next appointment at the V&A gallery.

Find this tiny police station in Trafalgar Square - allegedly made from a hollowed out street light.

Inevitably I felt a bit low back on ground, so perked myself and my two daughters up by going to see London's smallest police station (installed in 1926 to enable one policeman to keep an eye on the demos happening in Trafalgar Square). It is a only a short - but stunning - walk across Hungerford Bridge from the London Eye and then past Charing Cross to Trafalgar Square. We took photos and tried to guess how many super-slim police officers could fit into this police box. Still at least it keeps the wind and rain off, and made my children dance around looking for Sherlock Holmes. 
As for the cost to look: zero pence.

We were then lured into the National Portrait Gallery where there's David Bailey's self-curated Stardust exhibition. Even for the £16 ticket it's incredibly popular... definitely worth gawping at the queue to see if you can spot a celeb. Once tired of that, aim to fit in a 30 minute-gallery talk (on saturdays at 12 noon) in front of a painting. You'll be given a stool and then hear an expert tell you its history, context and all sorts of gossip about it - and always for free. We found out about James 1/James VI's very strange interest in witches and how his booklet about them, and insistence that communicating with a witch should be a capital crime, inspired Shakespeare's Macbeth. I think it's lucky for James that he is better remembered as the man who made sure the Bible was provided in English rather than Latin. However I now understand why his witch-mania led to him being dubbed "the wisest fool in Christendom", a fact that I'm sure will be useful for pub quizzes...
Cost for a half hour history talk: free.

In the UK lots of secondary schools teach Geography or History for GCSE - it depends on the timetable. So if you feel you (or a child in your care) is missing out on history I reckon a cheap day ticket to London to Trafalgar Square area could be a rich investment in historic learning. If you bring some sandwiches and eat them in nearby St James' Park then that's a free day out. Enjoy.

When all you want is Glamour in Chinese

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Here I find a tiny shop in London where you can find 139 Conde Nast titles (like GQ, Vogue and Vanity Fair) published in 25 countries... Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs). I also publish an interview every week with people who live or work in Islington at islingtonfacesblog.com - there's a prize for the 100th follower.

Around 39 million people read Vogue each month
 - so can you guess how many countries Vogue is published in?

Tucked beside a high street bank on the less glam side of Hanover Square there's a slim, white-walled newsagent which only stocks Conde Nast titles. The result is amazing - a wall of fabulous magazines in different languages, discretely ordered using the correct national flag.

If you want to learn French reading a glamorous magazine, travel like an upmarket Italian or swot up in the hope of joining Conde Nast's research team for the few countries which don't yet have their titles, then this is the newsagent to visit.

We all know Vogue and GQ, but since 2001 Conde Nast has organised 86 magazine launches around the world. There are now 20 Vogue, 18 GQ, 14 Glamour, eight Architectural Digest, two Tatler (Russia and the UK) and six Conde Nast Traveller.

2014 will see two new launches - a French Vanity Fair and a Traveller for the Middle East.

For any magazine addict it is a pleasure to visit this shop and imagine the zillions of different readers throughout the globe opening up a fresh copy of their favourite magazine.

Verdict: The perfect place for virtual travel, or simply try the website 

I wish someone would bring me chocolate

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Here I have a look at chocolate.... Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs). I also publish an interview every week with people who live or work in Islington at islingtonfacesblog.com - there's a prize for the 100th follower.

This is Austrian chocolate - marzipan swirls covered in
chocolate, and utterly delicious. This was a gift
from friends.

I eat chocolate every day. And I intend to continue to do so.

My morning cup of coffee is perfected by a chunk of chocolate.

At university my chocolate life was even better - whenever I studied at our otherwise rather horrible student house, the scent of cooking chocolate from the factories inYork helped (maybe hindered) the synapses.

How to get it
More than 3 million tonnes of cocoa beans are harvested each year - growing in countries not far from the Equator (top producer is the Ivory Coast, then Indonesia, coming in at number 10 is Peru claims wikipedia). No surprise then that between December and Easter I can usually rely on having a stash of chocolate – thanks to Christmas gifts,  and then Valentine’s Day, my birthday and mother’s day. (Seeing as Valentine's Day is coming up I thought I better make an appeal...)

And from April to December I'd face a hungry gap if I didn’t supplement my supplies by chocolate buying missions at the local corner shop.

Loving chocolate is a habit I’ve passed on to my daughters. Indeed for my eldest’s 13^th birthday we booked a free tour around the unique chocolate factory in Adelaide. Haigh’s Chocolates is really well known in Australia, but not available overseas, unless you have an Ozzie pal visiting.

Chocolate lovers don't have to leave the country (indeed the point of this blog is that we rarely do leave) because in the UK there are plenty of chocolatier opportunities: Cadbury World’s claim to fame is that it is one of the UK’s most popular tourist attractions. And then there’s the Roald Dahl museum which sells dreamy hot chocolate at Cafe Twit, and reminds the family about the classic story Charlie & theChocolate Factory. This book has now been reborn as a musical in London’s West End.

And there are also tours - and kids parties - at the Land of the Yorkie bar, York here.

Raw ingredients
Finding a ripe yellow podded cocoa bean is definitely tricky in London, but you can have fun doing a different sort of chocolate hunt by looking at chocolate bars to try and work out where the company sourced their cocoa beans. See if you can find the Fair Trade logo too, that way if you do make a purchase you’ll know that the person who grew those beans got a fair price for their hard work.

• Places to visit for your own DIY chocolate tour: 1)York and Birmingham. 2) Any shop shelf displaying chocolate. 3) And in my house my secret chocolate stash (the one that if anyone hears me rifling through allows me to deny everything, because "I eat like a bird")...

Over to you
What's your favourite chocolate - other than the one in your hand?