In early November 2018 my wife’s uncle came over from Canada. He’d emigrated 54 years ago and obviously was very much ‘Canadian’. He wanted a family day out with Jan, my wife, me and Jan’s sister and her husband. He had come to London with his son Stephen and Jan said that she’d organise a venue, which was suitable for all of us.

Covent Garden is nice an central for all of us as we could all get there quite easily from the suburbs. The pub we went to was the Nags Head, which is excellent. Even though it is in a plum tourist spot it’s still really quite old-fashioned with loads of character. There are photographs of the old Covent Garden (which is now long gone). It was nice to see the costermongers with baskets of fruit and veg on their heads. It might be old-fashioned but here was nothing old-fashioned about their prices which were very much central London. The food was also quite pricey and so we didn’t push the boat out too much.

The pub soon filled up with young men who were quite boisterous. They seemed to be Dutch no doubt out for a quick holiday in London. More and more of them came in and it was soon clear that they were football fans from the team PSV over here for a match against Spurs (Tottenham Hotspur) in the Champions League. They were wearing distinctive red and white striped shirts and drinking very large amounts of beer. Two police officers barged into the pub for no real reason and the atmosphere changed instantly. Banter became shouting and we discretely left being too old to ‘enjoy’ a pub brawl.

In some ways the day was spoilt but we soon got a cab back to Liverpool Street station and returned happy as could be to Romford.

Mike

Mike