Sultan's Elephant

How bloody brilliant is The Sultan's Elephant? After a tip-off from my dad yesterday (this event was not well publicised in advance), Dave and I headed into town and spent the afternoon following the events around Piccadilly and St James's Park, finding a convenient showing of the film Junebug to pass the time while the elephant had its afternoon siesta right in the middle of Piccadilly. Initially slightly bemused but then immediately enraptured crowds flocked amongst the processions to Waterloo Place, the Mall and Horseguards. You just had no idea what was going to happen next, though often it involved being sprayed with gallons of water from the elephant's gigantic trunk. The sheer size and artistry of the puppetry mechanics was totally overwhelming. Despite being three storeys high, it seemed utterly lifelike, and you barely noticed the hundreds of red-suited men and women operating the strings and levers in the middle of it all. The girl marionette's face was so expressive it stopped you in your tracks. Everyone on the streets was laughing and talking to strangers. Though the conversations sounded completely random out of context. "Why is the road closed?" "Because there's an elephant on it." "We've been following the girl - she's got out of her deckchair and is now riding on her scooter."
I haven't seen Londoners look this happy since New Labour swept to power in 1997. And doesn't that feel a long time ago now?

Capital Ring

Dave and I have just spent our most middle-aged weekend yet. We've taken it upon ourselves to walk the entire length of the Capital Ring over the course of the summer. We started at Wembley Park and walked all the way back to Crouch End, a distance of approximately ten miles. I don't think the Capital Ring circuit really takes you through the most attractive greenery of North London - the path completely misses out Hampstead Heath, Waterlow Park and Alexandra Palace, for example, and often you are walking through some terribly suburban housing estates. However, we did get to meander along a couple of unknown brooks through Hampstead Garden Suburb, see a duck-filled reservoir in Brent and enjoy the bluebells in Highgate Woods.

And today, since we have just spent £640 servicing and insuring Little Car for another year (Mum's old car - it needed a home so we abandoned some of our environmental credentials and adopted it), we took it on a "little run out" to the country. The country surrounding High Wycombe and the M40 in fact, where we visited two National Trust properties, Hughenden Manor and Cliveden. How lovely National Trust properties are - they have clean toilets and cake-laden cafes for the middle-aged to elderly ladies, a fair amount of history and romantic imaginings for those who fancy themselves as Jane Austen heroines, a shop to buy twee soap gifts for grandmothers in, country parks and woodland to go walking through, and lots of freshly mown mounds for children to roll down. The latter was something my brother and I took very seriously as kids, and I was delighted to see that the tradition still continues in subsequent generations today.

Yes, we are proud to be entering our middle age, with a wealth of stately homes left to explore.