IMP WAR NAT HIST MUS OMG WTF

Up at 7-something on a Saturday? I couldn't believe it. Rescuing me from Jof's grasping arms, the taxi ran all the red lights to the station where I got a chocolate bar and he got an all-you-can-dribble coffee.
Once we'd got away from the coast, the countryside was distinctly frosty with frozen ponds, but I read my Harry Potter book to pass the time. Witnessed sunrise at about 0800.
Snacking gently on sausage rolls, I had a few walks up and down the 12-coach train and ignored West Byfleet, Egham and Ashford as they were artefacts of a diversion to avoid engineering work at Wimbledon.
Bune (45) and Cameron (9) met us at Waterloo and we travelled vertically downwards to the London Underground network which I totally love. One stop away is Lambeth North where we found the Imperial War Museum with its twin 15" naval guns parked outside.
Inside is a large internal space with a V2 rocket, and a V1, Spitfire and Harrier jet suspended in mid-air on wires. Cameron and I loved the tanks and swords and the 8.8cm flak gun and the nuclear bombs but I was frankly bored by the art. One floor seems to be all depressing paintings and I really didn't like the fried plastic corpse representing the futility of nuclear warfare, but we did go in the holocaust exhibition (suitable for over 14s only) and the top floor which is about Victoria crosses and who won them. Cam and I played sillies in the lifts but if you used the stairs like the boring people you could get there 10 times quicker.
I liked the tiled wall of Saddam Hussein and the trashed Japanese fighter plane and the mini-tanks and motorbikes and the SAS machine guns and kukris but I categorically state that the shops are rubbish.
No Lego whatsoever, and Cameron and I looked everywhere but there wasn't anything at all we wanted to buy.
So we grizzled and moaned and whinged all the way back to the underground station about how tired our feet were. This is when we found the train with rubber separators between the carriages, a bit like Boris' bendy buses.
If you wedge yourself in the gap and put one foot in either carriage, they move independently and stretch you and squish you and it was epic and we didn't want to get off because we had to hold the carriages together to avoid an fatal accident. But at little-known station 'Monument' we found some 330 year-old pile of stones called the 'Monument' to the fire of London in 1666.
For only £6 we went in and started climbing the internal cantilevered stone spiral staircase. The walls have alcoves you can stand in but after you've climbed 10 circuits, the alcoves have shrunk to nothing, it all looks much the same, and your legs fall off.
I reached the top in severe pain having counted 305 steps (Cameron gave up counting after 200) but the brochure says it's 311. It was windy on the viewing balcony and there's a big metal net to stop you jumping off and a new office block is being built right next to it, you could wave to the guy in the crane.
Still, you get a decent view of Tower Bridge. Having descended, we had absolutely bags of free time so decided to do the Natural History Museum, as you do. Bune and Cameron went home, no staying power, these guys.
There was a long queue but I amused myself by chasing the innumerable pigeons, checking out the quality gargoyles on the excellent brickwork and looking at the 2 policepersons with submachine guns guarding the French embassy opposite. In fact the façade was so impressive I daintily asked whether I could use swearwords.
Inside was the famous Diplodocus skeleton and some huge fossils and bears and turtles and rocks and I loved the sharks and the snakes and the crabs and the squid and don't even talk to me about the life-sized blue whale and the mastodon tusks.
The human body section was quite fun and I pulled the levers and pressed the dingers and rang the bells and giggled at the sperms and the willies and the brains, but only because I pretended to be the Predator taking out King Willie's spinal column.
The Blue whale has a notice saying please don't bung stuff on his tail as it can damage this historic model but the tail is covered in coins! I mean, there's a £1 coin on there! What desecration of a perfectly valid coin.
But sometimes an interactive learning experience with flashing penis and light-up hooters just isn't enough, even with Mr Charles Darwin presiding, and we checked out both museum shops, wallets bulging from not spending at the War Museum. While I'm sure they're very nice, I don't need a museum key-ring or luminous skeleton or skull moneybox or any more morsels of magnetite.
There was no Lego. I was getting withdrawal symptoms. We didn't buy anything.
Opposite South Kensington tube station I saw the magic word 'Pizza' over a little restaurant called Love's Fresh Pasta next to a Sushi bar and Starbucks so we waited ages for a table. Eventually enough Sloane Rangers left to generously allow us to sit down and we had pepperoni pizza that was really good but had too much cheese (a recent complaint) so I scraped it off and we emerged fatter and rested, although the toilet confused me.
Because we still had lots of time we used the magic underground card and got out at Westminster and looked at the very big fence around the Mother of all Parliaments and they didn't have any Lego in the Houses of Parliament Shop either, OMG WTF FML, but we saw the Cenotaph and Whitehall.

Our last trip on the underground took us back to Waterloo where we still didn't get any Lego but bought Belgian lager again and found a train willing to take us home and we got on with 27 seconds to spare and we departed into the spreading night after 6 hours in London.
Was it a success? Well, we saw many things, visited many places and got very tired feet. But apart from pictures and memories, what did we have to show for our trip? The only thing we bought in the 5 shops we scoured was ... a tin mug with a Spitfire on it. None of the places I visited had a squash-the-penny machine.
I suppose I did read 94 pages of Harry Potter, possibly worth carrying it around all day. Jof picked us up from the station and as if by magic, she'd bought me some Lego.
One was the Star Wars Walker-bot that was not in fact Lego, but it had actuating gimbals and a shooting-weapon so who cares. While we ate sausages we spoke of the victories of the day and then I played Lego Nuclear Attack until shower-time and read Harry Potter until 1130, who's counting.