The 38 to Clapton Pond

At the Golden Fish Restaurant in Farringdon Road. Cod, chips, mushy peas, cuppa tea. Quality.

A little old lady being harried by thugs? Or a grand old dame with her three bodyguards?

A 19th Century almshouse tucked away in 21st Century Covent Garden.

An early spring view by the River Thames. (Put your clocks forward tonight.)

…something to look forward to.

Along the Regent's Canal on the way to Little Venice.

… get a hat. A really posh one. From Lock & Co in St James's

The clockwork train trundles through Toytown…

Let him that is a true-born gentleman, And stands upon the honour of his birth, If he suppose that I have pleaded truth, From off this brier pluck a white rose with me. somerset Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer, But dare maintain the party of the truth, Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me. (William Shakespeare Henry IV Part 1 Act 2 Scene 4)

This notice in the window of irascible book seller David Drummond of Cecil Court, WC2. Apropos of nothing save his own glorious grumpiness given that the poem's subject matter relates to trains and not shops, the sign is a symbol of the service you will find within: the BEST service in London. Hilariously short tempered, a unique "retail experience" (by God they'd hate that phrase) can be had here – and in all the shops in Cecil Court.

The old City wall & a 21st century hotel at Tower Hill.

Shop of the week, beautiful and utterly inessential, the jewellery shop in Rugby Street WC1 housed in what was once London's oldest dairy.

Climb The Monument .

Derelict chapel at Abney Park cemetery.

Unsworth's has the best London section of any bookshop in the metropolis. This blog stops at the one in St Martin's Court WC2.

The phrase "Break the Ice" enters the language via William Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew . The Duke of Wellington invented the Slush Puppy. One of those statements is false. (That's ice at midday in Trafalgar Square yesterday, btw.)

Dubious London facts: "In London one is never more than 10 feet away from a rat." Some say seven feet (those "some" being northerners, mainly). Some would say even closer – see this scene above in the Temple Church with a rat chewing the ear of a Knight Templar. For more, read James Herbert's tourist board classic The Rats . For less, see The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

More Hampstead design: even the tube station ticket hall has Art Nouveau flourishes. Or is this simply a statement of Hampstead's perennial fashionable status?

London always leaves a fingerprint to remind us where she's been. In the old Docklands the "planners" preserved industrial detritus as part of their "heritage concept". The cranes and machinery cast angry shadows on the unimaginative modernity.

A flake of London hidden for decades but exposed by the demolition of the Astoria Theatre block on Charing Cross Road to make way for the new Crossrail station at Tottenham Court Road. Wonder whatever happened to Veglio?

The City from Archway Bridge, the first sunny day of 2010.