As you are on a virtual tour we can start in the walled garden. My brother started by restoring the walls which had become overgrown with ivy and overhanging boughs. Then he set to work on the garden – a jungle where he kept his release pens.
This year it will be on Thursday 13th November. It’s when, in the old days, I used to go out at lunchtime in the City and drink Beaujolais Nouveau until I was sick. This exceptional year it was yesterday; the first day Londoners could go out on the lash in pubs and restaurants since March.
In the last century tube strikes were not infrequent. One morning in the 1980s a colleague was at the end of a long queue at a bus stop in north London. An expensive car pulled over and the driver offered her a lift if she was going to the City.
A long time ago I was staying with friends in Cumberland and we were asked out to dinner. Our host and hostess’s home from the outside was more like a manoir than a Cumbrian farmhouse.
Today’s text is taken from St Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians. “To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.” (1 Corinthians 9:22)
The peregrine falcons nesting on a ledge at the top of Charing Cross Hospital laid three eggs this year but only one hatched, on 27th April. They have little privacy as there are two webcams – one inside their nesting box and one above the ledge.
There will be plenty of time to applaud the custodians of my savings who have successfully adopted defensive strategies. I love the insouciance of Barclays; “you don’t need to do anything – the changes will happen automatically … “ A Business Premium Account seems singularly inappropriately named.
No sign of swifts over London but the Red Arrows did fly past this morning and I glimpsed a woodpecker on Wimbledon Common. When I was a child thrushes were common but I’ve only just realised they are rarer these days.