Thursday, June 23, 2011

A Walk Through Hyde Park And A Commute Home


I walked through Hyde Park this evening, which was a symphony of parakeets' screeches and whooping poilce sirens. Big old trees are thriving on a diet of centuries of dog crap and they loomed majestically out of a carpet of bright green rain-sodden grass. 
I chose one with a crooked pit of flattened branches to sleep in if I got accidentally locked in. I got lost, but I liked the feeling.
The Marble Arch Corner was full of pigeons whose ziggy-zaggy mating walk was much more important to them than the damp squib of the thudding rock concert that was failing to challenge Glastonbury.
I walked from Primark to Selfridges, the metaphorical walk of the upwardly-mobile Essex girl.
On the way home the rumble of the tubes thundering through tunnels could have been the sound of hell, like those terrifying vaccuum lavatories in planes. This is the time of a hot summer day when all of us are at our most identical, all glazed with a sheen of perspiration, each one of us sporting twin frown lines forking between our eyebrows, expressing our city stress as we scan fellow passengers for signs that they are going to vacate a  precious seat.
The picture shows some very fancy gilded railings, and some very un-fancy orange plastic ones that look as though they have been placed there purely to spoil the effect of the fancy ones. That's London for you!

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