Wednesday night we headed into the city to meet up with Chris Boshier. Good to see Chris. He has finally recovered from his mystery illness from Como, which he now thinks was food poisoning.

Thursday we had a slow start, but headed to Chelsea Town Hall again to try and sort out what we need to do for John to be able to spend longer in europe. Didn’t really get anywhere, but we tried. Not even sure what I have to do to get a British Passport yet. We will organise all of this when we get home.

In the afternoon we headed to Westminster Abbey to see a fabulous painting of the Queen that was painted by an Australian painter, Ralph Heimans. Atanas … our new crazy Greek friend, transported it from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abby. He showed us photos of him transporting it. It is worth roughly 6.5 million pounds! I loved the painting.

From there we wandered to No 10 Downing and chatted to the police there.

I’m sure they didn’t have all of those police and gates there last time I visited 38 years ago!

We also visited the Home Guard and watched the changing of the guard. We fluked all of this … we were just wandering.

From there we wandered to Trafalgar Square and saw this weird cobalt blue chicken … not sure what that is about, will have to google it! But it looked pretty cool.

We had a quick look in the National Museum … we were in a hurry but I managed a couple of Monets, Manets, Cisarros etc etc.

Then we grabbd a tube and met up with Marcus and his lovely new girlfriend Emily (a 505 sailor). We had a very pleasant late lunch in Kensington and then they drove us home as they were headed to Battersea Park to take the gorgeous Rollo for his afternoon walk. He is the brown lab that I babysat in La Rochelle last year.

I had a quick nap as I have now caught John’s cold and then we caught a couple of buses to Putney and caught up with my favourite European sailor, the delightful Dan Parsons. He is a gorgeous 28 year old that I would like to adopt! He is great … had a dramatic split with his girlfriend, but has bounced back larger than life and is currently planning and has actually booked in to rowing across the Atlantic in 2015! Go Dan!