Hot day today in London. Quiet this morning, and had a nice swim at lunch for 40 minutes. In the afternoon I travelled into central London to present ideas for a childhood cancer job to a room full of earnest young women from a cancer charity. The ideas went down well fortunately. Cheerfully left the meeting at 5.00pm and decided to walk across central London to Victoria. It took me an hour but was preferable to squeezing myself into the sweltering tube trains.
Imagined myself to be a sightseer. In fact seeing London in a heatwave is a bit like seeing a completely different town. The parks full of people sitting in the shade of trees in the early evening. Walked down Old Bond Street and its shops full of impossibly expensive clothes and jewellery, and paused in a doorway to feel the cool blast of A/C. On the way to Victoria Station I passed Buckingham Palace too. Became taken by the scale of the statue of Queen Victoria dwarfing her visitors.
On the train back to Brighton listened to a downloaded BBC documentary about survivors of the tube bombings last year and their struggle to overcome the trauma. One woman with a bomb-blasted leg ran a marathon, another guy ditched his job as a salesman as he struggled with the aftermath. He become a Junior school teacher and sounded a good deal more cheerful with his life.
Been looking at a fascinating blog called Dancing Goat in Iraq which is of a US soldier who has just been posted near Baghdad. Well worth a visit.
Below, a street scene and Queen Victoria outside "Buck House".
Imagined myself to be a sightseer. In fact seeing London in a heatwave is a bit like seeing a completely different town. The parks full of people sitting in the shade of trees in the early evening. Walked down Old Bond Street and its shops full of impossibly expensive clothes and jewellery, and paused in a doorway to feel the cool blast of A/C. On the way to Victoria Station I passed Buckingham Palace too. Became taken by the scale of the statue of Queen Victoria dwarfing her visitors.
On the train back to Brighton listened to a downloaded BBC documentary about survivors of the tube bombings last year and their struggle to overcome the trauma. One woman with a bomb-blasted leg ran a marathon, another guy ditched his job as a salesman as he struggled with the aftermath. He become a Junior school teacher and sounded a good deal more cheerful with his life.
Been looking at a fascinating blog called Dancing Goat in Iraq which is of a US soldier who has just been posted near Baghdad. Well worth a visit.
Below, a street scene and Queen Victoria outside "Buck House".
Comments