Despite last night’s prayers, we wake to pouring rain and slanting wind but another nice English breakfast after which we are misdirected from street to street by Google Maps, trying to find the wash-and-fold laundry that says “get it tomorrow” but means “or whatever date the clerk on duty actually writes on the receipt you cannot take with you.” But the clerk is Latvian so Cynthia spends a half-hour chatting with her while David waits outside, seeing how much water dripping off the three-inch wide awning he can collect on his pants from the watershed of his technical gear.

The weather is so … crappy, not to put too fine an adjective into use … that we decide to eschew going anywhere farther afield than our new home away from home: the V&A right across the street. We shoehorn ourselves into the free Fashion Tour. Our guide is a pixieish gal who tells us that docents must study for three months and take a verbal “board” to be approved in their specialty (more than one allowed, but three months and the exam for each), but the payoff is they may design their own tours: choosing the objects they will show and what they will say about them. Kinda fun unpaid job IMHO.

She’s big on fashion as a statement about the state of the world (style is substance): materials and styles change due to culture as well as commerce: witness the burkini invented in Australia in 2004 by Aheda Zanetti, whose invention has sold more than 750,000 times and become the subject of proposed bans.

We also joined a free tour of the V&A’s treasures but the guide’s choices seemed so quirky, and her delivery was such a soft mumble, that we fled the group and cruised through ancient Iranian oddities and art, including the Ardibil carpet, which is illuminated softly only 10 minutes every half hour.

We crossed the street back to our hotel, changed for dinner and the theater, and tubbed to The Oystermen restaurant, which had delicious oysters baked with exotic ingredients, lovely Dover sole, and a nice hake for the missis. The play, a short walk from the restaurant, was The Lehman Trilogy: the story of the Lehman family coming to America in the 19th century, founding a dry goods store, and becoming cotton distributors in Montgomery, Alabama. They began trading to NYC bigwigs and soon moved there, themselves, in time becoming the fourth largest investment bank in the US. None of them actually owned the company when it went under, and the play was daringly produced and well acted — an ENORMOUS number of lines over almost three hours with two intermissions … RUN to the bar for more gin — but we felt drowned and a bit distant from the characters as a consequence.

Interesting day filled with all the variety that London so effortlessly offers.