Podcast Episode: London: Palaces, Pride, and the Perfect Comeback

Pip: Brett Hayhoe has been to London — monarchist, Pride marcher, destroyer of two pairs of shoes — and he has thoughts. Several hundred of them.

Mara: This episode follows brett through one of the most layered travel entries in the World Traveller Series: London, royalism, Pride, and a very satisfying exchange in Trafalgar Square. Let's start with the city itself.

London: Palaces, Pride, and the Perfect Comeback

Pip: London is one of those cities that arrives fully formed in the imagination long before you land — and this post is about what happens when the real thing finally has to compete with a lifetime of expectation.

Mara: The post sets that up early, and the line that earns its place is this one: "Standing before them, I felt exactly what I expected to feel, which is to say I felt everything."

Pip: That's the gates of Buckingham Palace — described not as gilded, not gold-coloured, not gold-adjacent, but gold. For a devoted monarchist, this was not sightseeing. It was arrival.

Mara: The first London visit, in 2009, was technically a stopover en route to the InterPride AGM in Belgium — barely a glimpse, by the post's own admission. It's 2012 that delivers the full week, as International Guest of Pride London, hosted by Paul, then President of Pride in London, and his husband Neil, known universally as FiFi.

Pip: Five-star accommodation, complimentary. Confirmed, apparently, as the correct way to experience London.

Mara: From Buckingham Palace the itinerary moves along The Mall to Trafalgar Square — which the post notes the feet came to call "something rather less polite" by week's end — then Leicester Square, Soho, the Tate, and the National Portrait Gallery, where an evening launch for Gay Icons brought a conversation with Sir Ian McKellen.

Pip: Knight of the realm. The post notes the knighthood made the encounter approximately thirty percent more thrilling. That's a precise and entirely reasonable unit of measurement.

Mara: And then Pride itself — marching through London, through that particular weight of history. Which is where the post lands its best moment. A man in Trafalgar Square asks why, and I'll quote directly: "I told him it was because the other three hundred and sixty-four belonged to arseholes like him."

Pip: He did not have a follow-up question.

Mara: The post closes with a summary that puts GAY and Heaven — two of London's most storied LGBTQ+ venues — in the same week as Buckingham Palace's golden gates, and calls it perfectly normal. Because London would.

Pip: A monarchist, a march, and a comeback that needed no second draft. That's London.

Mara: Entry five in the series — Montpellier — is already out. More World Traveller territory ahead.