It’s my last Monday in London, so after booking a train ticket, I spend way too much time in the cafeteria trying to decide what to see and what to miss over the next few days and end up “enjoying” a breakfast of cold eggs, bacon, toast and tea. The breakfast at LSE is perfunctory at best when piping hot; when cold it’s downright mouth-torture. But at least it’s free. I wander up to the tube and make my way to the bomb-site that is Tottenham Court Road with no particular place in mind for all my deliberating, but I figure I’ll find something.
After wasting time in a bookshop trying to find the new Paul Raymond biography - it’s in the “business biography” section, which seems an odd place to put it, and by the time I find it I’m annoyed about their stupid cataloguing system and decide to punish them by not buying it - I find a shop called Fopp. Damian had told me that Fopp was a cheap CD shop, and I’m always one for a cheap CD. Sadly, though, it becomes obvious pretty soon that a) Fopp is an offshoot of HMV, and b) Fopp is no cheaper than HMV.
My wander continues westwards, because I realise there’s somewhere I want to visit. It’s the camera-nerd inside me, dragging me in the direction of the holiest of sites this side of Solms in German: the London Leica Store.
After the usual lunch - I’m beginning to wonder if that Pret apple juice is spiked with something highly addictive - and the usual bout of getting slightly lost for a little while, I find where I’m looking for.
My pace quickens as I see the familiar red dot logo, I get to the door, reach out and find that it’s locked. I compare the opening times on the window to the time on my phone. Yes, I’m there during opening times. There seem to be people looking at things inside. I try the door again as maybe I pushed when I should have pulled, or vice versa. No. And then, just as the mildly amused staff member comes to the door, I notice the buzzer I have to press.
Once inside, I wander about quietly and try not to drool on the display cases. The gear on display is stunning, and, not surprisingly so are the prices. I try to keep a mental tally of the combined worth of everything I look at; I lose track around item number six, at which point I’m already well over AU$30,000.
Aforementioned staff member lets me drool for a little while, then comes over and asks if I’d like any help. “Sure,” I want to say, “Help me out by lending me a few thousand quid.” Instead, I ask her if I can have a look at a Leica MP.
I was expecting her to go through a complicated security routine, and to be handed a pair of white cotton gloves, but she simply opened the display case, grabbed the camera and handed it to me like it was a camera worth many thousands of pounds less.
The camera itself is a thing of beauty. Small, weighty and solid. And oh so beautiful. I cradled it, I looked through its wonderful viewfinder, I fired the shutter and wound it on. For someone who relies on cameras from the ‘70s and earlier, it was like a whole new world. But sadly, one that I was only briefly visiting. Because, at £3,300, it was roughly the same price as the whole trip to London and Paris.
And this trip to London was the reason I wasn’t at home in Australia holding my own MP in my hands. I’d actually decided at the start of the year that I would treat myself to a nice yet horrendously expensive camera for my 35th birthday and, about a week or so before the date I was planning to put in my order, I got the email announcing the wedding. I figured the camera could wait; weddings only (usually) happen once and instead of a camera, my 35th birthday present to me would be a holiday in London.
But at least I got to hold one of those fantastic little machines for a few minutes.
And then I left with the one thing I could afford. The price list.
From there, I wandered down Berkeley Street to Piccadilly and along to Burlington Arcade, which was like an arcade full of Leica shops. In that there were a lot of shops full of things I had no chance of affording, not that they were full of cameras.
After a wander around Waterstones, something reminds me of a photography exhibition I was meaning to visit, so I head to the Atlas Gallery off Baker St (cue bad saxophone impression.) Sadly, because I’d left a notebook back at home in Australia, I’d missed the exhibition - photographs of the Rolling Stones recording Exile in France - but the lovely lass behind the counter was kind enough to let me browse through their copy of the book the exhibition was based on. It was fascinating, and I was kicking myself for having missed it, so I enquired to the price of the book. Turns out, it was a very limited edition and they go for over £1,000 on ebay. Immediately, my mind turned to everything I touched that day and I couldn’t enjoy the book without imagining that I was irreversibly damaging its precious pages. So I had a cursory flick through the rest of the book and was on my way.
The rest of the day was less than interesting. After a visit to London Bridge to pick up my train tickets, I made my way back through the rain to LSE, had a quick nap, grabbed a burrito and a beer for dinner then retired to my rooms for a cup of tea, a spot of reading and an early night.
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