Park Life

An afternoon in the park
The best view in London











Stale News
Nigel Slater’s got a new book out on English food that looks good, the usual mix of comfort food and personal memories etc. He raised the definition of cake when it comes to "Jaffa cakes "etc and rightly dismisses it for EU nonsense it is. However the easiest solutions if one is needed is:


A biscuit goes soft when it goes stale
A cake goes hard when it goes stale.

Park style
I’m sure you’ve seen the strange phenomenon of people (young ones) wearing their Glastonbury or Reading entry writs bands long after the event. I’m told by a young friend that if you present the band at next year’s festival you get a free pint! The sort for rumour that would’ve been true when still Mr Eavis gave away free milk to “revellers”. It looks particularly affect when sported with a business suit.

Coach Class
Saw 3 separate old blokes today in the park wearing baseball caps, nothing strange there but with a shirt and tie. They weren’t together, it just didn’t look right like an outing of American football coaches or something.

“ya, we found a great place to skate in Machu Pichu”
Greenwich Park had it usual posse of roller bladers. Of all the people in the London these must rank amongst the most irritating (see also skateboarders over age 18, free paper dispensers, the bald bloke who walked to front of the ticket barrier queue at Charing cross ..)
Like most sporty types it’s no good them doing anything if others don’t see/hear about so the peace of the park was broken by a screeching creature and her boyfriend. They then proceeded to act in away only ever seen in adverts, flouncing and shrieking some more, then there was pouting and posing for pictures and the sort of moves last scene in the video for “wired for sound”.
Now I’m all for joie de vivre, but the "look at me aspect" of bladers is annoying. I’ve been doing recruiting recently and inline skaters are the sort of vacuous types who put it on the CV’s, along with travelling and socialising with their “peers”. What they should really put is once every 3 months we whiz up and down the flattest, smoothest bit of London with no mind for others whooping and being falsely thrilled, we later meet up with people we half know from facebook and lie about where we’ve been in the world. God they are tiresome.

Smoke Chestnuts
A group of oldsters in a beer garden making a mockery of the smoking ban. By sucking on the biggest stogies you’ve even seen the whole garden was filled with acrid smoke, you had to laugh, well they did.



Inspired by this year bumper crop

Chestnut of the week
One of the smokers told this old but good joke, made better by his arcane reference point.

A young guy goes into a barber, he shows the barber a photo of Perry Como and say’s “I want my hair like him”.
The barber starts work and after a few minutes is done, he shows his client his work. The young lad isn’t happy “this isn’t how Perry Como hair looks.”
“It is if he came here” says the barber.

Not the best joke in the world but the laughter and joy it produced amongst the Cuban vapours was refreshing in strange sort way.