Robert and Dan’s trip to London had been inevitable from the moment that Penny told Dan he could crash in her spare room.

Consumed with curiosity for this new wonderdrug that Penny had opened his eyes to, Dan set about planning a long weekend itinerary for himself and Robert that he hoped they would never forget.

Robert was pretty excited too. He’d never been to London. Not properly. He’d been to Heathrow plenty of times with his parents on their way to some tawdry, chip-oil soaked, Brits-abroad, sunny, shithole. If Heathrow was anything to go by though, he thought, then London should be pretty fucking cool. He loved Heathrow. It’s sprawling enormity always got him excited. It was like a city in it’s own right with bars and restaurants and shops and amusement arcades and banks and policemen and toilets and everything! London, he thought, might make him faint with excitement. He wondered whether they’d be able to find a bar where they could get a seat.

Within a few days it was all arranged. Robert and Dan were taking the Friday and Monday off work to make a proper weekend out of it. Dan had been down Princes Street buying loads of new clothes from Next and River Island. Robert had been reading up on cocaine and it’s effects. They met up at Edinburgh airport on Friday morning for an early flight to Heathrow.

Robert had been there for 20 minutes before Dan arrived. He’d found out where to check-in for the flight and had already given up on his search for a newsagents after covering the entire airport three times. Dan loped in, he was a vision in baggy stonewashed jeans and granddad shirt. It occurred to Robert that Dan didn’t seem to fit his body very well. His legs were long but his body short. As if he’d been half stretched by some tortuous foreign regime for half a crime. This giraffian body shape meant that his 32L trousers didn’t ever look quite long enough and you could see too much, much too much, of his fluffy white sports socks above his green moccasins. Robert was a different beast entirely when it came to his clothing preferences. Preferring the plain classics to raging fashion, he sported a black T-shirt and a pair of shapeless beige chinos. Together they looked like a couple of crap undercover detectives trying to infiltrate a style snatching ring.

“Did you remember Penny’s address?” Robert was concerned. London was a big place (he’d heard)

“Yup, which of those three desks do we check in at?”

“That one – Heathrow 07:55”

“Cool, let’s hit the air!”

The Heathrow 07:55 was busy with suit wearing men carrying important-person leather briefcases. Robert and Dan felt very much out of place. The men in suits regarded them with some disdain. It was as if there was some unwritten rule that you must wear a suit and feel important to be allowed on the Heathrow 07:55. Robert knew this wasn’t true. There could be no such rule. But that didn’t stop him feeling like some pointless waster every time someone glanced at him over the top of their Financial Times. Dan, on the other hand, wasn’t bothered in the slightest. Hah, look at these suits. I bet they’re not away to get off their tits and have a Roman Orgy! He thought. Not that he knew, he just felt that there was an unwritten rule that if you didn’t wear fashionable clothes on the Heathrow 07:55 that meant that you were a boring old banker with no life and you’d probably spend the weekend gardening or playing Scrabble.

Aside from the sartorial anxiety, the flight proved pretty uneventful. Pretty air-stewardesses trundled by and gave them a tray of vacuum packed mini-food and some tea, only to appear 5 minutes later to clear the whole thing away again. Edinburgh to London only takes about an hour.

They landed at 09:05. About an hour after they set off and were swept along by the two-piece herd through a maze of corridors to a cavernous baggage reclaim warehouse. They waited patiently by the carousel while the bags bumbled slowly past. Eventually their cases appeared and the grabbed them and wandered out into the main body of the airport. Behind them, half a dozen or so suited up important types paced angrily and stared hard at the mouth of the luggage carousel, in the mistaken belief that this would speed the whole thing up and their precious bags would arrive more quickly.

Emerging into the bright and bustling wonderland that was Heathrow’s main hall Robert was already feeling emotional.

“This weekend is going to be fucking awesome! How cool is this? Look, there’s an amusement arcade!” Robert almost burst with excitement.

“An amusement arcade!?” Dan exclaimed with mock incredularity. “We’re going to have the weekend of our lives and you’re excited by Space Invaders? What a poof.”
He was right. Robert needed to pace himself. They needed to find their way out of wonderland and see if things could match up in the big smoke.

First things first. They needed to get from here to Kings Cross because that was the starting point of the instructions Penny had given Dan to find her office. When they found her office she would give him the spare keys. It was like a test or something. Their mission, if they chose to accept it. London was going to be great.

Finding the way to Kings Cross was pretty easy if a little on the mind-numbingly boring side. They found the underground line at Heathrow and got on the Piccadilly line train. It took longer to get to fucking Kings Cross that it had taken them to fly down from Edinburgh! What was all that about? Not only that but the whole time was spent squashed in amongst a bunch of backpackers who had obviously just returned from a trip around the world collecting new and varied backbacks with new and varied smells. The journey itself took in various drab, grey housing schemes and had around a squillion stops.

Eventually they got to Kings Cross.

Neither Robert or Dan had ever used the London Underground before. Dan had travelled a couple of times on Glasgow’s clockwork mini-version but it was no comparison. The underground nexus at Kings Cross was huge and, before they had even set off. Standing in the middle of a bustling station. They were lost.

In front of them was a large map of coloured lines. The London Tube map. Different colours mean t different lines. Different lines all had their own little instruction. All around them were signs pointing to where these different lines could be accesses in the real world. All this and they were still lost.

They were lost because the instructions just said “Take the Northern line down to Angel and get off there.” That was it. That was the entirety of the first part of their map to euphoria. “Take the Northern line down to Angel and get off there.” They just couldn’t find this Northern line in amongst all this information. It was getting a bit stressful.

Giving up on the Technicolor spaghetti of the tube map they made their way timidly to a ticket counter. There was a queue of 3 people in front of them and another, longer queue to their right. The queue to their right went down much quicker than the queue featuring Robert and Dan. Theirs was being held up by an elderly lady who was having trouble communicating her requirements to the girl behind the screen. Robert was always in the wrong queue. He reckoned that if someone was willing to take a bet on which of two queues would go down the quickest that he could safely join one and win some money on the other. All around them people were pushing past and moaning about something or other. It didn’t seem like the Tube was much of a fun way to spend time.

Eventually they got to the front of the queue.

“We need to get to Angel,” said Dan

“£1.00,” said the girl behind the screen

”Yeah, but how do we get there?”

“Just get on the Northern line.”

Dan began to feel very insecure at this point. He felt like a child who had lost his parents.

“How do we get to the Northern Line?”

“See that sign over there,” She pointed over their shoulders. They turned to see that she was pointing at a sign which said:

Southbound Trains
Hammersmith & City
Metropolitan
Circle
Piccadilly
Northern

“Follow that sign and you’ll get the Northern line, it’s only one stop.”

OK, that sounded easy enough. Follow the sign and get on the train and get off at the next stop. They paid their £2.00 and plunged into the crowd, happy that their adventure was back on track.

They walked down a couple of corridors and went down a couple of escalators before finally finding the Northern Line. It was just a platform, not exactly what they were expecting but there were lots of people here so it must be the right place.

They waited amongst the restless crowd.

After a few minutes Robert became aware of a peculiar, wind which blew through his hair. He got a bit freaked out as they were a long way underground. He never really had time to analyse this freaky occurrence before a train came hurtling out of the tunnel and stopped at the platform. The sea of people surged forward. A smaller pond of people came through the doors of the train in the opposite direction and fought their way through the sea. It was an unholy throng. Unwillingly, Robert and Dan were carried onto the train, adrift in the sea. Then the doors closed and they were off.

One stop. Angel. Finally.

They squeezed themselves off the train and surveyed their situation.

They saw a sign that said “Way Out”. They followed it eagerly and finally emerged gasping into the glare of an early summer London lunchtime.

The dirty bustle of Islington seemed like Nirvana to Robert in contrast to Dante’s vision from which they’d just emerged. People moved around them in the same gruff and unseeing way as they had in the underground but at least now they had room to move and fresh-pair to breathe.

Dan turned to Robert, “I don’t know about you but I really could do with a pint right now.

“Yeah, that would be good. Let’s find a pub and have a look at the map to see where Penny’s office is.”

Roberts legs were shaking. He felt disconnected from home in a way that he’d never felt before. His only travel experiences prior to this were package holidays in the Costa del Lager Lout. This was far removed from going to the airport and being guided through Check-in, onto the plane, through customs, onto a coach and into their 3 star family fun hotel complex. He had no idea where he was or what was coming next. Dan’s suggestion of a pint was exactly what he needed. A pint was a nice familiar thing. A little slice of home all the way down here. A pint. Ooh a lovely pint.