I hit the ground running on my first day in London, what with the Britmovietours Sherlock Holmes walk and the much less strenuous delights of staying in the Langham Hotel.
My second day in London, “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained” was spent even more energetically.
“I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather—that is, when the fit is on me, for I can be spry enough at times” ~ Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet.
I hesitate to say I was spry at all, but I was far from lazy.
Madame Tussaud’s
I’d always assumed the famous waxworks museum would be cheesy though slickly presented. I wasn’t especially tempted to visit, although I’ve been fascinated to read about the history of waxwork models and their role in studying anatomy through the publications of the now-defunct Morbid Anatomy Museum.
A visit to Madame Tussaud’s was on the cards, though, because of its Sherlock Holmes Experience theatrical event. And also because it houses a couple of Sherlock Holmeses!
The waxworks is every bit as cheesy as I’d expected, and also very slick – and a huge amount of fun. It’s a curious collision of the historical and the new, because Madame Tussaud originally made her waxworks of famous figures in the late 18th century. Here we are in the 21st with essentially the same technology and the same purpose – but now we can take selfies with our celebrity substitutes. Knowing they’re wax replicas doesn’t diminish the fun. In fact, if you’re a Doctor Who fan, you can imagine them all as Autons about to come to life and the fun just doubles.
Naturally I had photos taken with a few of my favourite historical and theatrical faves: William Shakespeare, Freddy Mercury, Helen Mirren and Benedict Cumberbatch.
It’s a labryinth inside, but eventually we came across the entry to the Sherlock Holmes Experience. Robert Downey Junior’s Sherlock stood sentry in the chamber, designed to look like a Victorian London Street.
The Experience is a bit of a mixed bag – the Baker Street set is good fun, and Mrs Hudson’s greeting and explanation of the puzzle is full of pizzazz. It’s fun to be sent through doors and find yourself at the docks, the morgue and other locales. The final part of the story gallops a bit quickly to a close and feels like it runs out of puff. But never mind: the crypt in which you find yourself is full of headstones with fabulously silly puns which you’ll get if you know your Conan Doyle canon.
London Walks: Sherlock Holmes’s London
Not content with punishing the shoe leather as mentioned, Tim and I went on to join the regular Friday afternoon Sherlock Holmes’s London tour run by London Walks.
Our guide was Richard (the Fourth of his name at the company) who was led us on our two-hour tour with its focus on Arthur Conan Doyle’s life and inspirations in London as well as locations from the 60 Sherlock Holmes stories he gave us.
Richard not only knows his ACD and Sherlock Holmes stuff, he speaks with warmth and wit. On the rare occasions this walk overlapped with the Britmovietour’s, Richard provided different anecdotes, so nothing is lost by going on both walks.
If you’re more a fan of the original stories than the various film versions, this is probably the walk for you, as it winds around places where Conan Doyle lived or visited as well as locations he used or was inspired by in creating his iconic characters.
In any case, for £10 it’s a great look at London and Sherlock Holmes, set at a pace that even Mycroft might easily manage, let alone Sherlock on a lazy day.
I have no secrets from Sherlock Holmes: Tim Richards and I are being hosted on this trip by VisitBritain.
While you’re in a Sherlockian mood, you might like to read my Holmes ♥ Watson novel The Adventure of the Colonial Boy, or a traditional Holmes + Watson short story.
Speaking of which, my Holmes + Watson story The Problem of the Three Journals, an alternative universe tale of Holmes and Watson as a pair of Melbourne hipsters who run a cafe and solve mysteries, will appear in Baker Street Irregulars 2: The Game is Afoot in 2018. You can pre-order your copy now!
I am off on one of my semi-regular jaunts to the UK for the purposes of research and fun (which are usually the same thing).
The Langham Hotel on Portland Place (off Regent Street) has more than one connection with The Great Detective.
A meandering two hour wander took us past filming locations, over Waterloo Bridge and past some of Conan Doyle’s real-life haunts and inspirations (including the former Northumberland Hotel, now the Sherlock Holmes Pub) to fetch up at Somerset House. The latter is no longer the repository of records of Births, Deaths and Marriages but it stands in as a less reputable location in one Holmesian film.
During my train adventures in late October, I spent a few days in Sydney, taking in the MAAS Museum and its excellent Large Hadron Collider exhibition, the splendid production of 
Those programs are aimed at assisting young people in the area to changte their lives through literacy, creative writing and storytelling. The seating and tables at the back of the store host workshops, and there’s a library for attendees to use.
Its forward is by one of my favourite writers, Benjamin Law. The stories are hugely varied, full of flair, humour, imagination and, from time to time, startling insight. Some of the tales are downright Kafka-esque! It’s fabulous to read the result of the project’s work with young people.
In late October I had the wonderful opportunity of joining 
The first leg of the trip was the overnight XPT from Melbourne to Sydney, courtesy Destination New South Wales. I like taking the overnighter to Sydney.
After a few days in Sydney (and more on that in some other post) we lobbed up for the journey across Australia to Perth, via Broken Hill, Adelaide, Cook and Rawlinna – the latter two a ghost town and a sheep station respectively.
If you think the journey’s better done by plane, you’re probably missing the point of this version of travel, which is all about the getting there, not the arriving.
It’s an opportunity to contemplate; or to strike up conversations with strangers. In this time of constant connectivity, I really enjoyed having long periods of time to focus on some books. Tim and I also caught up on a few episodes of Game of Thrones.
The Nullarbor itself is almost hard to look at, especially for this city dweller. I’m used to having objects that interupt my line of sight constantly. It’s never just a smooth plain to the horizon. But the Nullarbor is just that – a vast expanse of red dirt and low shrubs, that goes on and on and on and on and on… it induces an almost horizontal vertigo.
Speaking of dinner, the food was endlessly excellent, using local ingredients where possible, and these two vegetarians were very well nourished from start to finish.