When you open this website sometimes you must think “I don’t want this. This is just what I don’t want. What I want is Wodehouse and I want Wodehouse now.”
Put on your thinking cap. Mark Mason has written Question Time – A Journey Round Britain’s Quizzes. I know this because he has an article about it in the October edition of The Oldie.
It’s always worth browsing in a second hand bookshop. So often I buy something I didn’t know existed. This is a collection of interviews by John Mortimer, published in 1986, that originally appeared in The Sunday Times.
The Boileau Arms sat on the south side of Hammersmith Bridge at the beginning of Castelnau Road. Since the 1980s it has changed hands and name many times and is now The Castelnau. All this is terrifically relevant to Gascony where Castelnau is a common place name.
The French are better at preserving their architectural heritage than the English. Gascony (aka the Gers) teems with bastide towns built from the 12th to the 14th centuries.
Robert remarked that he’d seen a plethora of Parks Police cars; a lot of alliteration today. Today Hammersmith and Fulham have a joint police force (the Parks Police Service) to patrol the parks on their patch. They look like police but in fact only have the same powers as any other citizens.
It took a third visit to find this rather prominent grave at St Nicholas’s Chiswick. It is in a part of the graveyard that I thought only had modern headstones.
The stock market has been more resilient than I expected. As a result my somewhat defensive stance is underperforming but I intend to stick to my guns, or rather remain in my bunker. I haven’t traded since July.