In the margins

I have mentioned the shimmering walls at Debenhams of Oxford Street on several occasions, for example on 11th April. It happened that in the margins of the visit to Bridport, I met someone who worked for Debenhams who was able to tell me that what I had thought was an engagingly low-tech bit of modern art actually cost in the region of £12m, with the dosh having been stumped up by the landlord, Land Securities. However, this is not confirmed by http://www.landsecurities.com/ which admits to knowing about Debenhams, but says nothing about the Oxford Street store.

The next thought was that perhaps one could persuade the owner of the very tall round tower block near Vauxhall Cross to build a spiral model railway going up the outside, with maybe one turn to every two floors. One could then have a range of model trains going up and down the spiral - which would need to be a two track affair to do the job properly - with carriages illuminated in various interesting ways yet to be devised. Ought to be quite fun at night. Or maybe a double helix, working in some genomic angle.

Back in the margins of Bridport, we stopped off on the way home to take tea at a Costa, where the tea was fine but for some reason came in very heavy, white hemispherical cups. We could only think that the cups needed to be so heavy to reduce breakages. We also noticed three rather dirty APCs on entire transporters and two Sunseeker motor boats on transporters which had lost their tractor units. One of the boats looked brand new, the other needed a bit of a clean underneath. APC being, I think, the technical term, for something which looks rather like a tank but which has no gun and which is used for carrying a small number of troops around a battlefield, a sort of military version of a golf buggy. The Sunseeker motor boats looked very expensive, but a quick peek at http://www.sunseeker.com/en failed to do more than establish that the boats that we saw, flashy as they seemed, were probably near the bottom of the range. Prices on application.

The veranda on which we took our tea was protected from the wind by a bank of the plants illustrated, perhaps native to the Canary Islands, but doing rather well in this service area.