Bob Plays Dress-Up

Bob and I met at Oxford Circus station this afternoon, not to join the busy Friday evening shoppers, but to have coffee at nearby Nordic Bakery, whose tasteful calm is much further away from Oxford Circus than its nearby location would suggest. On our way to our next destination, we found ourselves on Carnaby Street, and as with last year's Christmas lights, the seasonal display lent a festive feel to the pedestrian street:

We browsed at the London Artists' Book Fair, which was positively filled with beautiful books--not books about artists, but books made by artists. I wanted many, many of the items on display, but, alas, the prices definitely reflected the quality of the books (fair enough). We left the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) building, whose glow was lovely in the dark night, and walked through Admiralty Arch, part of an imposing office building through which traffic passes between St. James's Park and Trafalgar Square.
Every time we've walked through it, I've wondered about the inscription, and this time I finally remembered to look it up: "In the tenth year of King Edward VII to Queen Victoria from most grateful citizens 1910." A short walk later, we arrived at Ray's Jazz Café in Foyle's bookshop, where we've seen performances in the past. Tonight's show was in conjunction with the ten-day-long London Jazz Festival, and the room was packed with appreciative people as the Alboran Trio played their pleasing pieces on piano, double bass, and makeshift percussion.
Ah, but the evening wasn't over yet! We made one more stop before heading home, near the newly reopened St. Pancras station, for an evening being held in conjunction with the St. Pancras Arrivals festival, a series of events to herald in the new station in style. Tonight's event, ETA, was vaguely described in the guide as a parade and circus, and we showed up not really knowing what to expect. The first thing we saw when we arrived at the designated meeting point was a simple, but brilliant, piece of video art which made use of the bricked up windows in one of the buildings along the parade route:
Each of the four station employees sat in their "windows," reading newspapers, staring at computer screens, and occasionally interacting with an unseen public
while we waited for the parade to begin.

It turned out that this parade was a bit of a participatory event, as people went through the crowds, recruiting some of us to join in on the parade's theme of travelling. Bob and I were standing, talking, when a woman walked up to us and asked Bob in a conspiratorial voice, "Would you do me a favour?" "Ummmmmm, okay," Bob said, "What do you want me to do?" "Would you put this on (holding up a trenchcoat identical to her own) and bring this suitcase to me at the end of the parade?" We looked around and noticed about a dozen trenchcoat-clad people trailing suitcases around us, and Bob got into his costume, ready to join the parade. You can just see the woman who roped him into this in the photo below--she's on the left, with sunglasses and a headscarf:
The parade was a rather low-key affair, but definitely a pretty one, as paper lanterns lit up the now very cold November night.

Ah, but the best paper lantern of all was this one, the Eurostar itself, which led the parade along the dark streets.
The screen with projected images of the Eurostar's route was a nice touch!
At the parade's end, the promised circus acts started, beginning with a ringmaster who made a tower of suitcases (including those that Bob and his fellow travellers pulled through the parade),
quickly followed by a lot of dizzying spinning around by these two men:
The ringmaster than announced the arrival of train passengers from different parts of Europe, and they appeared to float in the night sky, toward their "station":
By this time, Bob was quite cold (he hadn't worn his heavy winter coat to school today, and his costume had lent some extra warmth that he now missed) and it began to sound like the music part of the evening wouldn't be to our taste, so we got on a warm bus, looking forward to our cosy living room, hot Ribena, and a late dinner.