London has its grand underview, too. At Spitalfields great public weekend market, the hundreds of individual stalls offered everything from furniture, antiques, clothes, ethnic arts & crafts, small appliances, Scot wools & Cotswold wools, to nuts and bolts, and all at prices you couldn’t afford not to buy. The Sunday morning Columbia Road Flower Market is a true delight to the eye and the nose. Masses of bulbs on sale for tuppence’a pity we can’t bring them into the U.S.

Our group ended up on the most impressive overview of them all: British Airways London Eye, the huge wheel built for the millennium celebrations, and billed as the world’s highest observation wheel. Technically, it is not a Ferris wheel, as its carriages are hitched to the wheel on the outside rather than the inside of the frame. Each oval-shaped capsule easily houses a children’s birthday party or a 25-person adult cocktail gathering. The nine of our group on the 30-minute ride fitted nicely into its outer end’no, it does not tip. Through its steel-and-glass windows, on a clear day one can see across seven counties. On the whole, the trip was the "rottenest," London’s chic new word replacing "baddest" for what is the best at the moment.