a mixed bag - London & Peru (sort of)

I had the pleasure of introducing the lovely Alice from Bologna to the Daunt's bookshop in Marylebone High Street, a shop not only beautiful for it's architecture but also for it's unique (well probably not) way of arranging it's books by country, not just non fiction but it's fiction too.

Now Daunt's is becoming almost as famous around town for its ubiquitous bags as it is for it's shops.  Alice and I were in Daunt's for a book signing and during the evening, Alice bought a book and was given an ordinary plastic bag to take it home in.  Later in the evening I was kindly given a signed copy of the book being launched and Peter, behind the till kindly asked if I would like a bag for it and handed me one of their lovely linen ones.  

At this Alice started to pout for the unfairness on the bag stakes and Peter reached down below the counter to get her a linen bag saying as he did so, "would you like one?".  However, as Peter had been bending, Alice had been turning so what she heard was "come back another time".  By the time Peter emerged from the counter Alice was about to launch into "Why, that's not fair??!?!"  However, luckily I had guessed what she thought she had heard and pointed to the fact that Peter was holding out a bag to her, (she was still partially turned), and was offering it to her.

So a big thumbs up to Peter for not only giving Alice a bag but for giving us a really good laugh for the evening (and cementing my reputation with Alice for knowing what she is thinking).

By the way, Peter's not crazy about photos and since I adore his hair I include a backward shot as well. 

Meanwhile, and unfortunatlely I haven't got a picture of any of the people involved in this, but I want to give a big thumbs up to the gentleman on the 82 bus, going northbound around 10:30pm at Dorset Sqaure on the evening of Wednesday, 30th April.  It was during the tube strike and the bus was full and everyone wanted just to get home.

I was on the top deck and could hear a confrontation between the driver and a passenger getting on.  The driver turned off the engine and wouldn't go anywhere until the passenger got off again.  Everyone around me was either just grumbling, calling the driver names and the passenger names in equal measure or getting off the bus.  This one person, (I could only hear partly what was going on), offered to pay the new passenger's fare, the driver started the engine and we all got home.  He was only person on the bus who didn't think just of himself but of the solution.  Thank you.

One of the great things about London is it doesn't matter how long you live here, (from birth for me), there are always new things to discover.  My friends introduced me to my first Peruvian restaurant, Tito's, new London Bridge www.titosperuvianrestaurant.com

We were greated by Carlos and Juan who both made us all feel so welcome.
Carlos went on to not only explain the dishes to us but also, we then had a really interesting chat about the economy in Peru and the changes going on then.  We also had a really good laugh about introducing Guinea Pig on to a menu in the UK and how he could imagine that going down with patrons; "bring us your pets, we'll cook them for you!".  That may not sound so funny here in writing, but it really was very funny and light hearted.

So to Carlos and Juan a big thumbs up and thank you for a lovely evening and for teaching us so much.

As always, if you would like to send in a post to tell us something nice that happened or to say thank you to someone, just get in touch and we would have great pleasure in putting up your stories here.  Thanks.

I borrowed a couple of pictures off the web this week so,  copyright acknowledgements: 

thanks to Kake for the picture of Tito's www.flickr.com/photos/kake_pugh/  reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence://creativecommons.org/licenses/
and to Urban75 for their lovely picture of inside Daunt's  www.urban75.org/blog/