Trooping The Colour: Chinooks, Wes Anderson & Goth Pizza

 

I started off my airshow season on a beautiful summer's day in London for the annual Trooping The Colour flypast. Unlike most years I had company with my lovely and long-suffering friend Hilary joining me to celebrate our passions for Chinooks & day drinking!

On the train

Arriving into London

After being distracted by the cute stationary shop in Victoria Station we headed down to The Mall to watch the flypast.

And to take the most epic selfie ever with the Chinooks!

Clearly the coolest people on The Mall

Hilary patiently endured the next 10 minutes of my autistic info-dumping of the aircraft that were flying over us. 

The aforementioned Chinooks

Battle Of Britain Memorial Flight Dakota

Phenom & Texans

 

Voyager & Typhoons

Globemaster

A400M

Rivet Joint

Poseidon

Typhoons

Red Arrows & F35s

I like how the F35s are framed by the Red's smoke

After a pit stop at the Eros statue to eat our Tesco salad bowls (lunch of kings) we went across to the Design Museum for their Wes Anderson exhibition. We're both fans of his quirky but charming films and it was really cool to see props, costumes & his drawings. 

Costumes from The Royal Tenenbaums

Costumes from Moonrise Kingdom

Stop motion puppets from Fantastic Mr Fox

My favourite Wes Anderson film The Grand Budapest Hotel

We had a walk through the lovely Holland Park before heading to Camden.

There's a vampire-themed pizza restaurant in Camden called Lost Souls Pizza that I've been dying to try (pun fully intended) for ages now and it didn't disappoint!

It's decorated with loads of cool horror-movie posters and artwork. 

Clearly my room needs this

I fit into the aesthetic very well 

The pizzas were even black!

An accidental sub-theme of the day was my managing to match all my drinks to my eye-makeup

Our next stop was the decor polar-opposite of Lost Souls Mr Fogg's Botanical Tavern. There are loads of different Mr Fogg's locations across London (Vana and I went to the 'Antique Emporium last year) and it's my goal to visit all of them. 

So pretty

Not quite so pretty 😅

It was another decor 180 when we went down to the next door Hidden Society cocktail bar which had cosy 'old library' vibes.

I feel low-lighting is far fairer on everyone around me

They had a crazy cocktail menu inspired by works of art which lead to Hilary having a tomato soup flavoured cocktail inspired by Andy Warhol's soup can paintings. 

As the day drew to a close it was time to head home and leave London to it's beautiful sunset. 

Thank you so much to Hilary for putting up with me for a whole day!

Now we're into the airshow season I have 2 in a row with Headcorn this weekend and Duxford's Summer Airshow next weekend. Naturally there will be aviation related spam, sorry content to follow.

Love Jen

XxxX

I'm Not Okay (With Feeling This Old)

 

It's a truth universally acknowledged that when one begins the fast descent towards their 40s that they may on occasion vastly underestimate the time frame in which past events happened. Case in point - emo was surely massive only 10 years ago .... right ..... right???? Well no actually as evidenced by The Barbican's I'm Not Okay retrospective celebrating Emo's explosive era from erm 2004 ....

So on Tuesday my fellow elder emo Hilary and I went up to investigate (appropriately dressed in our My Chemical Romance merch obviously) 

In 2008 with our friend Alli

Naturally I had to recreate my standard red and black make-up from the emo era -

I can feel Gerard Way's pride in me

At this juncture I feel it's only appropriate to share some photos of vintage Emo-Jen .... as opposed to current Emo-Jen. And yes Chris I have cut you out of the MCR-gig photo so you still pretend you didn't go 😜

Off to see My Chemical Romance in 2007

 

 

I actually think I look cute here (2008)

Reading Festival 2007

The aforementioned red and black ... no idea what's happened to make the pot noodle so rock n roll though 😐

Christmas 2006 with the obligatory skinny scarf and studded belt

At a 30 Seconds To Mars show in 2008

Er no my style hasn't really evolved has it? 😂 But back to the subject at hand. We arrived at The Barbican and promptly got lost .... 5 times ...

The most confusing place ever

We finally found the music library and the exhibition and I was instantly transported back to my youth. 

It was (no pun intended) actually quite emotional seeing the memory wall with people's photos and memories of the emo-scene. I couldn't have as much fun as they did with hair and piercings because I was 19/20/21 and working when emo was at it's peak so I was living retrospectively through them!

❤❤

This made me chuckle

I miss emo 30STM

The parts of the display that I liked best (read made me feel old) were the display cabinets with merch and magazines of the era. 

I had this copy ....

Some things really don't change ...

I loved my RAZR phone and I had the MCR tour poster underneath it 😁

On the way out I found the first candidate for my year-end 2025 in music blog ....

After leaving feeling suitably nostalgic (and getting lost on the way out too) we went to Sandwich Sandwich for some much-needed sustenance. On the way I was reminded just how much I love London's mix of old and new architecture. 

We went across to Spitalfields Market for a look around -

I love London's skyline at night

Hilary knew some really cool 'secret' bars so we went on a tour. We started at the Discount Suit Company (not the 'Discount Soup Company' as I originally thought she said). It was a speakeasy style bar underneath a suit shop. 

Next up was the London Cocktail Club which was circus themed -

Mojito

The final bar we went to (and my favourite) was The Mayor Of Scaredy Cat Town which you get to by going through a fridge in a restaurant 😅 

I loved that the ice cubes had the key logo shaped into them

It was a really great day of nostalgia, labyrinthine building, giant sandwiches and cool bars. Now we just need that My Chemical Romance tour ..... please guys? 

See you at the Black Parade!

Love Jen

XxxX