Basement 1

Last week also saw a return visit to the basement of the government offices at Great George Street mentioned at reference 1, to the western end, now known to google as the Churchill War Rooms. BH alleges that I have been there at least once before, perhaps in the days when serving officials were allowed in for free.

As it happened, the bicycle tuition people are in our road at the moment and I took the opportunity on this day to button-hole the lead tutor about bicycle bells. Rather to my surprise, she told me that use of bicycle bells was not part of the curriculum, in part because some people got quite rude and offensive when you rang a bell when coming up from behind them. I think I managed to convince her that teaching the children to at least do something when coming up from behind was a good plan - and I did not tell her that my reactions are such now that I sometimes find it easier to shout rather than to ring, with commands getting to the mouth faster than they can get to the fingers. In my defence, I should add that the finger action needed to ring a bicycle bell is a little awkward.

Then, at the end of the road, I was amused by the sight of a heron, taking refuge from a flock of parakeets by perching in the very top of a tall thin conifer.

After that, in Court Recreation Ground, I would have asked a gent, in civvies, about his litter picker, not having been able to source a decent one myself, but desisted as he was in deep conversation with someone else about the Ribblehead Viaduct. See reference 2,

And so to Green Park where I was able to inspect the bicycle signage at the southern entrance to Queen's Walk (illustrated), where there was nothing to be seen in the form of access denial to bicycles, although there had been some such on the way down from the tube station. I think I might reasonably refuse to pay any £60 fine that might be imposed after effecting a southern entrance.

St. James' Park saw my closest encounter yet with pelicans, although this was later trumped by tales of great flocks of them parked along the Pacific beaches of Peru.

We missed the sand bags at the entrance to the War Rooms by some four years, now replaced by a rather unsatisfactory brown metal porch. Not ugly, but uninspired; a pity that whoever had been tasked with its design had not been able to come up with something better.

I shall pick up the narrative in a post to follow.

PS: in the margins I learn that Court Rec., once a King George playing field (he must have had a personal stake in the creation of urban green space after the second war), has now been accorded the status of a Queen Elizabeth II Field, although I have not yet run down quite what that might mean.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/anxiety.html.

Reference 2: http://www.visitcumbria.com/carlset/ribblehead-viaduct/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/new-scientist.html.