I’m back in Paris and there’s a heatwave raging. After work today, I went to three different stores looking to buy a fan. All sold out, nothing but empty shelves. I’m making do with my ROWENTA air purifier which isn’t really a fan and doesn’t diffuse cold air, but at least it moves the (hot) air around. Today’s forecast is 37°C (98.6°F) and tomorrow 36°C (96.8°F).

Here are some random photos of my London trip. You might snicker, but I enjoyed walking behind these shapely women. All you see in Paris are skinny women.

Shaftesbury Avenue near Covent Garden. The Odeon 4-screen cinema house below has an interesting history. It used to be an important West End theater called The Saville where it staged small musicals, revues and dramatic plays. Designed in an Art Deco style, it opened in 1931. During the London Blitz of 1941 it closed temporarily due to bomb damage. And then things changed dramatically in the 1960s when Brian Epstein, manager of The Beatles, leased the place and presented rock and roll shows. The venue became notorious for its Sunday night concerts and big names like Chuck Berry appeared on stage as well as Jimi Hendrix, Procol Harum, The Bee Gees, The Beatles, of course, and The Rolling Stones. In 1970, The Saville was taken over by ABC Theatres and converted to a two screen cinema house. In 2001, the building was taken over by the Odeon cinema group and is now the four screen Odeon Covent Garden cinema.

My favorite coffee place called Monmouth Coffee Company, located at 27 Monmouth Street (behind Covent Garden). There’s another Monmouth Coffee Company that I always go to in Borough Market underneath London Bridge, but this year – because of the depraved Islamist terrorists who savagely murdered eight people in Borough Market and on the London Bridge on the night of June 3rd – I didn’t have the heart to go near the place. I just couldn’t.

I had dinner with a friend one evening at this Monmouth Street restaurant, Wildwood Kitchen. For simple, reasonably-priced fare I recommend it.

Every year I pop into Fopp, located at the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Earlham Street in the “Seven Dials” area, the backstreets behind Covent Garden. Here’s what TIME OUT magazine says – Three floors of new releases and back-catalogue surprises, plus good selections of books and DVDs, make this a great place for bargains. Look out for world cinema, art house masterpieces and animated. Once a small national indie chain, Fopp is now owned by HMV – although prices and stock have remained poles apart.

Recommendation: Steps away from Fopp is the fabulous flagship bookstore, FOYLES, located at 107 Charing Cross Road. A cultural institution, it relocated to the Saint Martins School of Arts building and was entirely renovated. Coffee shop and restaurant on the premises.

To the Underground (subway) back to my hotel.

NEXT BLOG POST – shopping on the King’s Road.

Before the Eurostar, you had to take a slow train from Paris to Calais, a slower boat across the English Channel to Dover, and an even slower train up to London. It took an entire day. The fabulous Eurostar hurtles across northern France at 300 kilometres per hour (186 mph), slows down to enter the “Chunnel” (the Channel Tunnel) at 160 kilometres per hour (100 mph), before bursting out the other end in the south of England and then up to London. Travel time is two hours, 22 minutes.

Riding the sleek, high-speed Eurostar is, in my opinion, the height of sophisticated travel. Arriving at London’s St. Pancras train station is always exciting. A new service from London to Bordeaux opens on July 2nd. Other Eurostar destinations are Amsterdam, Avignon, Brussels, Bruges, Lille, Lyon, Marseille and Paris.

At a staggering cost of £800 million and over a period of six years, from 2001 to 2007, St. Pancras train station was completely renovated and expanded. The end result is stunning. To be frank, it puts Paris’s Gare du Nord to shame. There are shops galore, a champagne bar and other bars, coffee shops and eateries and, of course, connections to other rail services and the London Underground. I took the Underground (the subway) to a place I’d never been before, a hotel retreat in East London called The Royal Foundation of St. Katharine. The place had been recommended to me by an office colleague. I went because of its garden and quietude.

Set in tranquil gardens in the East End, this charity-run bed-and-breakfast is a historic retreat dating from the 12th century. It’s a 3-minute walk from Limehouse station and a 30-minute walk from Tower Bridge and the Tower of London.

Basic, TV-free rooms have en suite bathrooms, complimentary Wi-Fi, and tea and coffeemaking facilities.

A continental breakfast buffet is included, and there’s a bar and snack service throughout the day. Within the peaceful gardens, there’s a chapel, a lounge and a conservatory. Meeting rooms are available.

Arriving mid-afternoon, I walked briskly round the neighborhood then returned to the hotel/retreat/conference center. “Would you like to have a drink in the garden?” the friendly receptionist asked. “That sounds like an excellent idea,” I replied. So I gathered up some reading material and carried a large G&T (gin and tonic) outside with a packet of potato chips. And there I sat, in total silence save for the chirping of birds, reading the papers and enjoying the grass under my feet until dusk. There are no televisions or computers at St. Katharine. No smoking either.

This is the view from my bedroom window. I slept with the windows wide open and was lulled to sleep by the sound of the wind in the trees. Bliss.

Breakfast the next morning was a generous buffet spread of cheeses, cold cuts, smoked salmon, different kinds of healthy bread, cereals, yogurt, granola, fruit, juices, teas and coffee. All of the highest quality. I shared the breakfast room with a legion of Swedish teenagers, visiting for a conference.

After breakfast I walked around and came across these gorgeous sitting rooms.

Sunday morning I went for a walk and ended up near Canary Wharf overlooking the Thames River. Joggers and cyclists zipped past me.

This area, called The Docklands, is very old and historic. This riverside pub called The Grapes, for example, dates from the 1720s and is on the site of a pub built in 1583. It was formerly a working-class tavern serving the dockers of the Limehouse Basin. It survived the intense bombing of the area in World War II.

Here’s Limehouse Basin today. Real estate prices range from £375,000 to over £1,600,000. In 1865, ships and barges entered this area which used to be called Regent’s Canal Dock. And then in 1969 the docks closed and were abandoned. The redevelopment of the Isle of Dogs area started in the 1980s and the previously “no-go” zone of industrial wasteland became a desirable “go-to” location for offices, apartment complexes and visitor attractions.

In closing, here’s my personal opinion on London’s East End: away from the financial hub of Canary Wharf and the steel and glass buildings of the dockside development, most of the East End remains what it has always been: poor, immigrant-populated, gritty. Some areas I walked through were charmless and utterly unlovely (that’s polite for downright ugly.) I wouldn’t walk around here at night.

Like New York City’s Lower East Side, the East End has been home to successive waves of immigration ranging from the Huguenots (French Protestants) to Bengalis, Pakistanis, Chinese, Russian and an important Jewish community. From the late nineteenth century until the late 1970s, the East End of London was to all intents and purposes a Jewish enclave. The Jewish community came suddenly and in great waves from 1881 onwards, transforming the areas they settled in, building synagogues, setting up tailoring and cabinet making workshops, opening Yiddish theatre and Jewish schools.

Today it seems to be the Muslim community that predominates here. There are niqab-clad women everywhere.

As much as I enjoyed my two-day retreat at The Royal Foundation of St. Katharine, I won’t return for two reasons: the area around it is unlovely, and to get there is complicated. From the subway line you have to switch to the DLR line (Docklands Light Railway). On the Monday, I checked out and moved into central London to one of my most favorite neighborhoods (Bloomsbury) and to a new hotel I hadn’t tried before.

More on that later. In the meantime, here’s an interesting blog I found on the history of the East End:

http://the-east-end.co.uk/

Last weekend my five-year old godchild and I went to our favorite park and playground in Lille.

We call it “le parc rouge” (the red park) because of the red fencing, but that’s not its official name. I’ve been going to this park for ten years. I used to take the other kids when they were small. Now, sadly, they’re no longer interested. They’re teenagers now so they have more important things to do on the weekend. Like lying comatose on their beds while plugged into their smartphones.

After the playground, we walked across the road to another favorite spot called La Gare Saint Sauveur. Once a freight station, it now houses a bistro, a cinema and a large art exhibition space. There’s always something going on at the Gare Saint Sauveur.

This is a lego station where people can build their own models. Out back, there’s a communal vegetable garden.

Back inside to the art installations in the warehouse-style space.

This is Scott Hocking’s Tower of Babel constructed from large bricks. “What’s that?” my small companion asked. How do you explain an ancient myth to a child? “Once upon a time in a far-away land …”

I like the idea of exposing children to art (or exposing art to children.) Lunchtime approaching, we headed to the bistro but it was packed. 

“Come,” I said, “I know another place up the road where it’s quiet.” “But I’m hungry!” my companion cried. “You’re going to love this place,” I said, “You’ll have a plate of fries and a burger.” “With ketchup?” “Yes, with ketchup.”

This is the children’s menu for 9 euros. He loved having his own little pots of ketchup. I had a speciality of northern France called a “Welsh”. It’s Welsh rarebit (melted cheddar cheese on toast), but at this restaurant they serve a deluxe version with ham slices inside.

Heavens, I’ve just noticed in the above photo how he’s clutching his knife and fork as if they were a chisel and pick. My little companion is going to have to learn good table manners (like most French children) if he’s going to eat with me in restaurants. At this 5-star hotel (called L’Hermitage Gantois) there’s a gastronomic restaurant, but we were in the informal brasserie called L’Estaminet. I’ve eaten here about two dozen times and each time the waitstaff is a little bit snooty. This mystifies me because in general the people of Lille (called Lillois) are very friendly. The food though is very good. And the hotel is gorgeous. They’ve recently added a spa.

In this 2014 documentary film about British Islamists living and proselytizing in north-east London, you can see Khuram Butt, one of the London Bridge terrorists, participating in a prayer session in Regent’s Park during which a black Caliphate flag was unfurled. He was a supporter of the banned Islamist group al-Muhajiroun.

Also featured in this documentary is Siddhartha Dhar, a convert to Islam who later travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State. Dhar, 33, is suspected of becoming a masked public “executioner” for Isis. Despite being on bail for alleged terrorism offences, he was able to travel to Syria with his wife and four children under the noses of the security services.

Why are these grotesque individuals tolerated in the U.K.? How is it that they are allowed to hand out indoctrination pamphlets in the street, defy police, unfurl the Caliphate flag in a public park and declare that one day it will fly over 10 Downing Street??