Disgressed

Elizabeth has been trying to arrange work experience for herself (her school has chosen to do it in October, reasoning that if they pick a time when other schools are not looking for placements they’ll benefit from the relative lack of competition). According to her, many of her fellow-pupils take a relaxed or unimaginative approach to this: quite a few are doing work-experience where their parents work (often at Mum’s hairdressers shop, apparently), and many have organised a nostalgic trip back to work at the nursery where they once toddled.

Elizabeth wanted something a bit more cultural and her first idea was Hampton Court. She emailed them some time ago and got a reply saying it was too early, but that they’d let her know in the summer when they started thinking about it.

As time passed, and after one cautious enquiry, she more or less gave up on hearing back, and was pursuing some other avenues, notably the British Library, where things were looking pretty hopeful.

Then yesterday when I got in, she told me she’s been offered a couple of weeks shadowing a Warden at Hampton Court. The only problem is that the offer’s already more than a week old.

“You haven’t checked your email for over a week?”

“Well, I’d sort of given up.”

“Yes, but… but…!”

I suppose it’s a generational thing in part – if they’d contacted her via Facebook she would certainly have picked it up within 24 hours. I’m sure it will be fine, but it did make me think again about email.

One of the things they don’t tell you when you get your first email account is that you’re basically taking on a small new chore that you’re going to have to keep up with every day for the rest of your life. Ordinary physical post isn’t the same – you don’t have to make a particular point of logging into your doormat regularly to check whether anything has landed on it.

It’s worse if you lumber yourself with lots of email accounts, of course. There was a time when I had five basic ones and three or four others for use in particular contexts or with particular groups of people. That’s a pretty stupid way to set things up unless you redirect everything into one place, which I was not technically sophisticated enough to do. Nowadays I only really use three addresses; my work one, one for blogging, and the basic home one.

The basic home one has always had my name on it, but has always been used by other members of the family. It seemed strange to me at first that Katharine, who wouldn’t dream of signing herself ‘Mrs Peter Hankins’, was content to give an email address with my name in it. Over the course of time, I’ve noticed that this is not actually uncommon. I thought it might be a male/female thing (my parents, for example (hello there, folks!) seem to have a sort of division of labour where my father does email and my mother does phone texts) but subsequently I’ve come across two or three examples where if you wanted to email, say Jim Brown, the address was CynthiaBrown@googlemail.co.uk or some such.

I suppose the explanation is obvious really – if you’re prepared to suffer the minor embarassment of having someone else’s name on your emails, you don’t have to look at them every day anymore because the poor twerp who actually owns the account will have to do that for you…

…doesn’t really affect me much. I do use the Tube regularly, but I don’t actually have to.

If anything, travel was slightly easier for me yesterday evening. It so happened that Katharine and the girls were going to see Oliver! with Rowan Atkinson; I didn’t particularly want to see the show, but I met them for an early dinner beforehand, so I was starting from Drury Lane. I got a bus from the Aldwych to Victoria. And my word, there were buses.  Normally when the Tube is out, the first thing that happens is that the buses get so packed out they’re not viable either. But this time there were so many extra buses, there really was no problem at all getting on one. Going down Victoria Street there was an amazing double row of buses stretched down the road; two thirds, or perhpas three quarters of the vehicles I could see were double-decker buses.  In fact, it got close to being counterproductive, as the huge number of buses slowed the traffic to the point where it almost became worth walking instead.

This morning on the walk from Victoria, I was joined by a host of newbies, many of them with backpacks or serious walking shoes and a manner which suggested that they were gamely grappling with adversity rather than having a bit of a stroll through the park. A squirrel stood upright on the fence, forepaws draped over the top in the manner of a man leaning on a five-barred gate, and watched with incredulity as the herd thundered past.

Some of my colleagues are not in today, others came in by boat. It’s all good fun really; I almost wish I was more badly affected.

These days, I often take two small detours so that my journey to work, besides the train, includes walks through two parks; the local one on the way from home to station and St James’s on the way from Victoria to office.

St James’s Park is certainly not devoid of interest; once I followed a marching band all the way, and this morning I had to pause while a group of khaki-clad Guardsmen jogged past. Frequently early tourists can be seen trying to make friends with the squirrels (” Aren’t they tame?”  Actually I’d say it was more like contemptuous) or more recklessly, the pelicans (malevolent).

Some say that the view walking east from Buckingham Palace has been wrecked by the intrusion of the London Eye, but really all they mean is that the spires of the Treasury peeping over the trees no longer look quite like a landscape by an early Italian master.  Now they look like a landscape by an early Italian master with a really big white wheel in the background – but what’s so bad about that? Think of it as a piece of fantastic iconography relating to St Catherine if it helps.

But actually the local park produces its share of human interest. The man I may have mentioned previously here is no longer to be found practising the bagpipes in a stand of trees, alas. The alien parakeets have not disappeared, though, and can make up any noise deficit if they feel in the mood.

Sometimes there’s enought noise anyway.  One morning a while ago there was a fat man walking across the football pitches waving his arms and shouting over and over at the top of his voice: 

“Mother you killed your son!”

Try strangulation next time, I thought, and changed direction slightly.

Last week as I passed by the pond there was a solitary woman sitting hunched on a bench. She didn’t look like an early nature lover, more like someone who’d had an explosive row over breakfast – or possibly the night before.

Then by contrast there was a couple feeding the ducks. 7.30 am is a bit early for that, and they weren’t really in either of the age brackets where feeding ducks seems natural (childhood, second ditto). It can only have been, I think, the first throes of love, where people are suddenly gripped by a desire to do mad, cutesy things together on impulse. They gave me a faintly hostile look as I passed by – I suppose I was encroaching on their personal space, but hey, if you want your love-bubble undisturbed by passers-by, don’t stand next to the place where three paths converge on the bridge, alright?

There used to be a lady with a pushchair who I passed every day and gradually got quite friendly with. We would always at least say hello in passing, and as I passed out of earshot there would invariably be some comment from the chair like:

“Why is he wearing those clothes?” or more enigmatically  ”That’s not the same man.”

Far more unsettling, though, was the man I occasionally passed on the path under the trees who merely smiled and said

“Yes.”

I haven’t seen him for a while; perhaps he eventually got taken on by some large organisation to add a relentlessly positive note to their proceedings.