Well, that was all rather fun. Neither of us had been to the ballet before, so when dad offered tickets we jumped at it. In fairness we were supposed to be watching it at the Opera Garnier in Paris, which is why we went to France back in May. That didn’t happen – no tickets.

Anyhow, it gave us a chance to see inside the Royal Opera House, which we’ve walked past so many times but never entered. It’s quite fab, and the view of the plaza from the terrace of the Ampitheatre Bar is the best view of Covent Garden going.

…and the view of the champagne bar downstairs isn’t so tatty, either. Good job we wore our smarts, not that we spent much time down there.

So, the ballet. We didn’t really know what to expect, which might have been a good thing, as we went with open minds.

It was the Bolshoi doing Don Quixote, so a pretty high standard for your first experience, and it didn’t disappoint. Well, not us, anyway, but dad had seen better (he’s seen a lot) and to be honest we could see where he was coming from when he said that the end of it would have been done better if they’d headed back to the village for the wedding scene.

There’s not a great deal of story to Don Quixote, and it seems to be a bit of an excuse for showing off how good a dancer you are – kind of like Cirque du Soliel on tip-toes – but that makes it all the more impressive. Random fact: when they pirouette on the tips of their shoes their big toes feel the force of 2 tonnes… and they did a lot of pirouetting.

Even if it weren’t for the ballet, the Opera House alone would be a good enough reason to visit. It’s truly beautiful building, with parts dating back to the 1700s. It’s also a lot bigger than you’d expect. The stage itself is fairly conservative (and only around a third the size of its rival in Paris) but the tiers and boxes seat over 2200 people, and everyone gets a good view.

Would we go again? Most certainly. We even looked up what was on at the Theatre Royal in Norwich last night…

Crossing Regent Street tonight (long story – delayed tubes) I found myself next to a blind man.

‘Excuse me,’ he said.

Me: ‘Can I help you?’

Him: ‘Will you tell me when it’s safe to cross.’

‘Of course,’ I said, looping my arm through his. He tapped about with his stick for a bit and then stepped into the road.

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘It’s still red.’

‘I know it’s red,’ he said. ‘But there’s surely nothing coming.’

And he dragged me across the road in front of a bus.

We both made it to the other side.

This is brilliant. If you’re in London, head down to the Royal Academy and take a look at Anish Kapoor‘s Tall Tree and the Eye.

It’s a 15 metre high pile of 76 metal balls, highly polished and reflecting the surrounding buildings. The Guardian revels in the fact that it looks so fragile and light – and it’s right, it looks like the spheres are bubbling up from the floor and floating off out of the courtyard.

For me, though, the best bit is looking up at the reflected courtyard in the balls at the top of the pile, which is just beautiful. You get a great bird’s-eye view of the gallery all around you while keeping your feel flat on the floor.

I’m not convinced by the whole living artwork idea of putting people up on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth for an hour at a time. Or at least I wasn’t, until yesterday when the project went live, along with the video stream that lets you watch what’s going on.

Best view of today must have been the poor woman who got the 17h – 18h slot, which coincided with the heaviest, noisiest thunderstorm I’ve seen in ages.

And there she cowered, squatting down on the plinth as the rain bounced up around her ankles, oblivious to the fact that the highest point, after Nelson’s Column and the dome of the National Gallery was the point of her umbrella. In a storm. With lightning.

My tube this morning was adorned with little paper doves, cut from scrap and hanging from the overhead handrail by bits of old string. Whoever made them had written little notes on them, like ‘NO CO₂AL’, ‘End Climate Chaos’ and ‘Be the change you want in the world’.

I quite like protests like that, particularly as the police have been hyping up the potential for flying punches later when the G20 protests properly take hold.

What that’ll do to my chances of getting home at a decent time I don’t know, particularly as Liverpool Street is supposed to be one of the focal points.

Lots of businesses around there – and particularly the banks – have told their staff to dress down in case their suits make them targets, which highlights their generally outdated attitudes to work wear. If it’s OK for staff to come in wearing smart casual when there are protests on and the work will still be done, why can’t they do that every day?

Walking through the station the other day I saw some people with signs that said if you didn’t want to be filmed you should inform someone in a yellow jacket. I thought nothing more of it and went down into the tube.

An hour later, this happened:

I don’t think we’d have stayed for breakfast even if it was included with the room. I’m not sure how clean it would have been.

So, saved that dilemma, we packed up our bags and walked down to Covent Garden by way of all the closed bookshops on Charing Cross Road. We had been wanting to drop in on Foyles. Nixed.

Instead we went to Upper Deck, the cafe at the London Transport Museum, where they serve cheese, beans or mushrooms on toast, frothing coffee and cake. You sit on what looks like old tube train seats, and which rock as much as the real thing when you share them with anyone else.

As you sit there, you look out on the shop – a shrine to the anorak. They sell books full of bus number plates. Why anyone would want one of these and what they would do once they got it home I’ve no idea. Frankly it scares me.

The cheese and the toast, though: excellent. And highly recommended.

Just don’t share your seat with anyone else.

Certainly the most opulent wedding I’ve ever been to.

We headed up to London on a Saturday – something of a rarity for us. It always seems like a good idea until you get to the station. This weekend’s problem was all the trains stopping when they were still five miles outside of the city, tipping us out onto the tube. Not unexpected, but tiresome nonetheless.

We still got to the hotel in time to get changed, eat lunch and break the toilet (in fairness it was already on its last legs) and tube it down to the RSA. That’s the Royal Society of Arts. Very snazz: painted walls, stylish decor and busts (stone variety) on every corner. I went there years ago for a party, but that was confined to the vaults and we didn’t get to see the best bits then. Today we did. They got married in the Great Room, a theatre wrapped in the skillful daubs of John Barry, and his Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture.

Everything was perfect. The string quartet, the staff, the food, the company. Ems was dressed in the most fantastic shoes and dress; Luke in a suit and basketball pumps. A bit like Doctor Who. Perhaps most impressive, though, was the speeches, given in both English and French without a flaw, and spoken like true natives.

The champagne flowed on through the night as we moved back down into the vaults. There we cracked open the huge stack of cheese that was their substitute for an English wedding cake, and the traditional mountain of sugar-spun balls that batted for France, until we left just gone 22h.

What a shock it was to leave such refined surroundings and return to the faulty wiring in our hotel, with its malfunctioning heater, plastic cups and noisy, noisy corridors.

Accommodation aside, it was a fantastic night, and great to see two good friends so well suited and so happy together.

A surprising evening. Drinks with the leader of the opposition was more impressive than drinks with the prime minister.

In fairness, my main reason for going to the Gordon Brown event two weeks ago was that I’d see inside 10 Downing Street. David Cameron’s editors’ drinks tonight, I went to because that I’m pretty sure – regardless of my own political leanings or the boost Brown’s getting from the economic meltdown – that he will be the next prime minister. So I wanted like to see what he’s like.

Turns out he’s very nice.

The drinks were in his office in Portcullis House, the enormous governmental office building opposite the Houses of Parliament. It’s an impressive construction. From the outside it is a great glass and metal hulk with a hundred redundant chimneys. Inside, as you come in through the front door, past the stern and very visibly armed security that far outweighed those guarding the prime minister (automatic rifles slung over shoulders), through the metal detectors, x-ray machines and gates where they take your photo, you walk into an airy atrium; home to shallow pools of water, neat rows of trees and an impressive glass roof that arches high above the canteen.

David Cameron‘s office is in the building next door – an older building that smells like a school, connected to Portcullis House by a glass-covered walkway that cuts through a smokers’ courtyard with tables and chairs and a note of complaint from the non-smokers.

It’s modest and all the more welcoming for it, like a gently ageing hotel room with a bulky little TV stood on top of what looked like a mini bar.

At the other end of the room was his desk, bedecked with family photos. Two awards sat on the shelves among the parliamentary records and a couple of leisure books, including Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. A carefully positioned prop for tonight?

It was wonderfully low-key. Cameron himself was the most casually-dressed among us, milling around without a jacket or tie. No doubt it was carefully stage-managed, like Steve Jobs’ black top and jeans, but it gave the impression that he had just finished a long day at work and then actually chosen to spend his social time hanging around with us. He hadn’t, of course.

He worked his way through the room, and when he got to where I stood by the cucumber dip he shook my hand and looked at my badge. ‘Ah, MacUser,’ he said. ‘I know Macs’.

He didn’t use one at work (I asked). Turns out the Parliamentary computers are as tightly locked-down as those in a regular office and like everyone else there he used a standard-configuration PC.

‘So you have a Mac at home?’ I asked.

‘I used to,’ he said. ‘My first computer was a Mac.’

We didn’t speak for long, but I was impressed by the way he could chat knowledgeably and in a very relaxed manner on pretty much any subject. I was stood there with a former editor of Drapers, the fashion industry must-read, and Corrine who edits a medical journal, and he spoke to us all in turn about our specialist areas, asking questions that not only made sense but were genuinely interesting.

Within the hour he was gone, called away while talking about our clinics, Macs and fashion hot tips, but he was far more impressive than Brown, if for nothing more than the fact that he spent more time walking around the room and making an effort to talk to everyone there. Brown, of course, was pushed for time, and as we discovered the next morning he’d spent the rest of that night reshuffling the cabinet, so he’d clearly had more important things to think about than a room full of editors.

Cameron was a worthy ambassador for his party; Brown, that night, was less so. But then Cameron has more time to do that – it’s his job – while Brown’s job is to run the country, for now, and so comparing the two like-for-like is perhaps unfair. And perhaps impossible. The impression I took away with me, though, was that while Labour – as a party – is more appealing than the Tories, Cameron is a more appealing leader than Brown.

I left just after he did, to be escorted out of the building and have all evidence of the fact I’d ever even been there – lanyards, ID, name badge – confiscated at the door.

Do you know, 10 Downing Street is just a bit… ordinary. At the same time, though, it’s really very special, and I think it’s the ordinaryness that makes it that way.

Tonight’s event – drinks with the Prime Minister – was smart dress, obviously, but other than that it was very casual. I didn’t wear a tie, and that put me in the majority. The staff were very normal and not at all well-spoken or posh. Even the prime minister, who wandered around the room shaking hands and saying hello, was very off the cuff and unprepared when he did a little talk to us all. He cracked a surprising number of jokes for a man in the middle of a financial crisis, and everyone laughed. I don’t think it was out of politeness, either.

So what’s it like? Well, getting onto Downing Street itself was a lot easier than I’d expected. I took my passport as proof of identity, and I was on a list that had been finalised well in advance, so no doubt there had been some kind of secret service checking up going on beforehand, but it took less time to get through all the checks and scans than it does to get onto a plane.

Speaking to the other people there (all members of the British Society of Magazine Editors), everyone had been a bit nervous beforehand, and there was some excitement as we walked up the famous street, past number 9 – the first address on the street – to number 10, the most famous (number 11 is the last address on Downing Street). The policeman who stands outside said there was once a very rough pub on the corner – one of the worst in London – but he didn’t know where numbers 1 to 7 had disappeared to. Neither did he know what it was like inside Number 10, despite working there. He asked us what it was like when we came out and explained that there was a definite divide between the staff on his side of the door and the other. He was police; the ones inside were government security (yes, it was a real gun, yes they were real bullets and no he hadn’t shot anyone yet).

I’d been led to believe that once you get through the door you’re up against a wall of steel bars and that the door is only ceremonial, but it’s nothing like that at all. You actually find yourself in an airy hallway with a fire to either side (unlit), a disabled toilet to the left (the window above what looks like the next door down the street is actually the window of that loo), a long corridor down to Number 11 and another leading straight ahead. That goes to the Cabinet Room, apparently, but although Gordon Brown invited us to pop down and have a sit at the table we couldn’t; he’d forgotten that he was supposed to be having a cabinet meeting in there, and as soon as he was done chatting with us he was sucked straight into it.

Number 10 has often been described as warren-like, and that’s very apt. It really is huge, with a little garden in the middle decked out with tables and umbrellas.

We walked up the famous staircase lined with the black and white portraits of former prime ministers (they’re running out of space – Tony Blair is already lined up with the top step) and into the Pillared Drawing Room. The photographer, merrily running around snapping pictures of us in front of exhibits from the Government Art Collection, told us to go wherever we wanted so long as we didn’t open any closed doors, and so we walked through to the State Banqueting Rooms (tall ceilings, Trusthouse Forte-style panelling, lots of candelabras and rather impersonal), and the White Room, where the Prime Minister meets visiting dignitaries. Whenever you see him (or her) photographed meeting with another prime minister or president by the fire, it’s been taken there.

We (two of us) got chatting to one of the Downing Street staff, who was quite happy to natter about all sorts of things. We were on the first floor, he said; below us were offices, and above us was the Prime Minister’s flat. I asked him if there was a bunker beneath Number 10, and it turns out there isn’t; it’s under Number 11. Someone else asked if there was a special toilet just for the Queen and he said there was, kind of. Did we want to see it, he asked. Of course we did.

So he walked us down a corridor to a rather ordinary looking little bathroom which we used, just so we could say we’d been in the Queen’s toilet. It was two rooms, with the loo in the inner room, its walls floor-to-ceiling gold mirrors, and three orange lights up through the extractor fan. Very strange; it felt like a very posh airline toilet. The soap was Carex (although I opened a drawer and found some Moulton Brown) and one of the taps was missing its turner. Mrs Thatcher apparently had it jazzed up when she lived there, and it was certainly very 80s.

He was quite happy to talk about the people that worked there. Gordon Brown did a lot of work; Tony Blair went to Chequers every weekend; John Major always worked sitting at the cabinet table, which sounded too much like working at the dining table for my liking.

You really couldn’t fault any of the staff: they were friendly and approachable and put everyone at ease, and the food was good enough to forgive the rather abrupt half eight drying-up of the wine.

I wish I could have taken in a camera or a phone, but they all had to be left at the door, which perhaps explains why you never really see pictures from inside 10 Downing Street. As we all traipsed out at the end of the night, though, we stood by the famous door in front of the inscribed letter box (‘First Lord of the Treasury’, as if anyone needed to know you lived there) and had our pictures taken for posterity. Everyone was a bit self-conscious about it, of course, but as the policeman said everyone did it we soon got over the embarrassment.

All in all, an excellent – and very unusual – unusually ordinary night out.