Derek sails around Cape Horn: 3. Carols with Kate

No, I don't mean a sighting of the female half of the Middleton family, besides, for the pedants amongst you, there is no apostrophe "s". But more on this later.

Another crisp and chilly London morning dawned and following a light breakfast we headed down to the Tower of London, and in particular to Tower Bridge so that we could experience the city's newest attraction. Amazingly, there was no queue, so with tickets in hand we ascended the lift to the top of the north tower and ambled across the newly opened glass floored walkway some 40 metres above the River Thames. It was surprising the number of other tourists who could not bring themselves to step onto it despite it only being 10 metres in length, but we had no such qualms. The views upstream, downstream and directly below were fabulous. Once back down to street level on the other side of the river, our tickets permitted us access to the engine room from where the raising and lowering of the road-bridge is powered. This too was hugely interesting, all the more so considering it was designed and built in Victorian times.

As there was still not a cloud in the sky, we thought we would try our luck by journeying back along the South Bank to Westminster and chancing the queue for the London Eye. Lady Luck was indeed with us, once again there was no line to speak of and thus we were soon in our pod (with just two other people), making our revolution of the wheel. The views from the top were even more spectacular than from the Bridge.

It was now after 1pm, tummies were beginning to rumble and so a lovely lunch was partaken in a cramped but very amenable French bistro in South Kensington. I had confit of duck followed by the first creme brûlée of the holiday for dessert, and all washed down with a refreshingly cold beer.

Following this, the calories needed to be burned off so we decided to walk back to our hotel rather than go by tube. As there was no great rush, our route took us through the Natural History Museum for the briefest of looks, past the Albert Hall and up into Hyde Park. By now, dusk was falling rapidly, and the numerous squirrels in the park were all heading back to their dreys. However, at the other end of the scale, the Winter Wonderland Fayre consisting of dozens of stalls and amusements was just beginning to come to life. It was fine for a look, but cheap, tacky and ripoff are just three of the words that came to mind as we ambled through.

But back to the carols. Before leaving Jersey we had managed to obtain two tickets for Kate Rusby who was performing a Christmas concert at the Barbican. The Barnsley songstress treated her wrapt and appreciative audience to a mixture of Christmas songs, traditional carols and uniquely Yorkshire folk versions of traditional carols. All in all, a magical two hours.