fulham palace by katharine eastman
One of my toughest ones ever (to listen to, not to make) - this one should sort out the women from the woboys or girls or whatever the expression is. Never mind. Whatever it sounds like - and no I've not heard it yet - that is EXACTLY how I intended it to sound, nothing is accidental, nothing is a mistake, nothing is the sound of a phoney muso masquerading as a real one.
Yesterday a friend and I popped up to London - specifically Putney and then across the bridge to Fulham. When I was first told that we were going to "Fulham Palace" I did of course think that we were going to see Fulham play Crystal Palace, but then I remembered that neither of us can stand football. Yesterday, as usual, London did us proud and was beautiful. I still cannot square the Youtubes that are constantly suggested to me via the algorithm showing London as a place of non-stop rioting and robbery, with the London I experience when I go there of nice friendly people moving very slowly - some nearly as slow as us.
Neither of us are up to doing much in warm weather - she has never been south of Southampton, and I never go outdoors if the temperature rises above about 18 degrees C. Usually. So we didn't have a packed agenda. In fact all we did was go to Fulham Palace - I never knew Fulham had a palace (ie a big house made of bricks that looked a bit like my previous house/home except it had lots of hangers-on running about trying to look busy).
The best thing about it was that it has beautiful gardens, it's free to enter and wander about, and there are a couple of beehives - not very healthy colonies, I'd say, the bees looked tired and seemed to have come out in sympathy with the striking doctors. Maybe the worst thing was that we popped back over the river to the Duke's Head pub for a late lunch and had a very second-rate time, our waiter was one of those floppy-haired public schoolboys - he only had about 3 tables to look after but even that was beyond his abilities - and the food was crap and cold.
We sulked and skulked and at one point they thought we were trying to sneak out without paying (I'm not sure if we were or we weren't) but my friend said that we couldn't find anyone to ask for the bill and could we pay at the bar next door, which even I found odd, but they pretended not to, and my friend seemed convincing.
The thing that was either brilliant or crap is that we got the train back to Clapham Junction, expecting there to be a train to Southampton soon. But no, there wasn't. No sign of a train at all. We asked a man what was going on and he told us to go to Waterloo and try from there. So we did. But our tickets weren't for Waterloo or any mainline stations and people got excited but then got bored of us and told us to run over there and get on that train, it was a packed train to Southampton. It trundled out of Waterloo. And it stopped at Clapham Junction. But there was no room for anyone to get on and sit down.
So we felt like winners - we are of course very very old and don't give up our seats to ANYONE not even pregnant women or pregnant men. Later, as we were supposed to be pulling in to Winchester station we stopped a mile short and the guard came on the tannoy and told us that we were in a queue because the guard on a preceding train had been assaulted and the police were dragging the horrible people off that train and taking them away to be given a hundred lines "I must not stab South-Western Railway Guards to death", that'll learn em.
So that puts it all into perspective - our biggest gripe yesterday was that we'd had lukewarm sausages and mash on another day when we'd woken up desperate for something to do to fill up this aimless drifting life, and in the meantime the real people living real lives had had to put up with the ghastliness of the awful British public.
recorded today, photo Fulham Palace gardens yesterday
