London Letter: Mean Time, here’s the news about the lunch…

Many years ago there was a rather unfunny joke about a Nigerian reporter reading a bulletin and starting off like this: ‘It’s six o’clock Greenwich. Meantime here is the news.’

Okay, I know, you didn’t exactly fall off the chair. Nor did I – and why I remember such a weak quip after 40-odd years, I do not know.

However, last week I took a couple of days off to do something I have always vowed to do in London – visit the Maritime Museum which is located on the Greenwich Mean Time meridian, or zero degrees longitude.

I particularly wanted to view two exhibits, Sir Robin Knox-Johnson’s boat Suhali which was the first yacht to be sailed solo around the world, and see Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 22-foot James Caird, which he sailed in the Southern Ocean in one of the greatest feats of seamanship ever recorded.

To this day, mariners stand in absolute awe of how Shackleton and his five crewmen survived the harshest seas in the world in an open boat during a desperate bid to rescue the rest of their colleagues who had been marooned on the Antarctic ice pack for two years.

Sadly, both exhibits have been moved – Suhali to Southampton as her beams were rotting, and the James Caird to Dulwich College, Shackleton’s old school.

Shackleton fans still visit the boat and drink a tot of rum to the great man – something I’ll be doing soon as well.

Anyway, management and I got off the train at Greenwich cracking a barrage of appalling ‘Mean Time’ jokes (There’s the Greenwich Observatory. Mean Time lets have lunch), which got progressively weaker, if that is possible.

The Brits have a way of doing museums; they show everything, warts and all, and you still feel somehow proud to be part of the cultural DNA. And when they display exhibits, they have the genuine thing.

There were love letters Lord Nelson wrote to his mistress, Lady Hamilton, so well preserved that it’s as if he wrote them yesterday.

In fact, one section of the museum is devoted entirely to Nelson. There’s even the jacket on display that he was wearing when he died – the bullet hole clearly visible.

Pre-battle speech

There’s also the blood stained breeches that had to be cut off him by the surgeon. Nelson hung on just long enough to learn that ‘England expects every man to do his duty’ – his version of a rabble rousing pre-battle speech – had been carried out magnificently.

After a fascinating few hours, I told management we would have a ‘nautical’ lunch. I expected to find a whole load of waterfront pubs with names like Francis Drake,

Roaring 40s or Mutiny on the Bounty, as for many sailors Greenwich dock was their last sight of home as they sailed to foreign lands.

Most journeys took several years, so it must have been pretty traumatic.

But no; instead of pukka Brit taverns, there were armadas of Spanish tappas bars, more Chinese takeaways than you could shake a chopstick at, Thai curry houses and even a couple of Tequila bars.

I sagely remarked to management that in days of yore, many seamen wouldn’t dream of sailing off to fight the French without having a hefty helping of Mexican fajitas beforehand: Mean Time, let’s have a Margarita.

This we did before doing a tour of the Cutty Sark, once the world’s fastest tea clipper, and then catching a river taxi past iconic landmarks such as St Paul’s, Big Ben and the Tower of London.

Ironically, the next day we drove down to East Sussex to walk in the Ashdown Forest, made famous by AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books. We also did a nature trail on some

private land and lo and behold, there was a sign saying we were slap on the Greenwich Median.

I couldn’t believe it; by some quirk I was almost to the centimetre exactly 100km south of where I had been the day before.

We stared at this for a bit, management on the eastern hemisphere and me on the western.

Then she said, ‘Mean Time, let’s have lunch.’