On Sunday morning the Force was with local party colleague Albert Kemp and me in Abbey Road: tradesmen's bells worked, friendly residents let us in, we got almost all our Focuses delivered in record time and the weather was almost perfect. Delighted to learn that illustrious colleagues from other parts of London had come to help the previous day, including Jonathan Fryer and Monica Whyte. Thank you! Please come again.
Beforehand, I took a walk with the dog in Regent's Park. Politics extend there too - the Royal Parks have applied for planning permission to bulldoze an area of semi-wild vegetation and build five-a-side football pitches covered in artificial turf and enclosed with wire netting. This strikes me as odd when Regent's Park already has a large area of very nice real grass football pitches open to the public. I am not convinced that that there is a shortage of five-a-side football pitches, especially ones made of rubber crumb. In fact the only person I have so far come across who claims there is a demand for them is the company which plans to lease the area from the Royal Parks and hire out the pitches privately. And even if there is demand, I don't see why the pitches have to be in one of our precious Parks.
It's the rubber crumb that really puts me off. There is little enough space with living vegetation in the concrete desert of London as it is. Not only does vegetation produce oxygen to breathe, but also in hot weather it is cooler than elsewhere and at all times of year it soothes the soul. None of these are true of rubber crumb.
Albert and I adjourned to a pub for refreshments and got talking about science fiction. Turns out that we are both keen Philip K. Dick fans. A particularly good read is The World Jones Made, in which liberal values are taken to their logical extreme. Then someone leads a backlash. He is a precog, but the trouble is that he can't see far enough ahead. Bizarre, astonishing - the author was a genius.
Beforehand, I took a walk with the dog in Regent's Park. Politics extend there too - the Royal Parks have applied for planning permission to bulldoze an area of semi-wild vegetation and build five-a-side football pitches covered in artificial turf and enclosed with wire netting. This strikes me as odd when Regent's Park already has a large area of very nice real grass football pitches open to the public. I am not convinced that that there is a shortage of five-a-side football pitches, especially ones made of rubber crumb. In fact the only person I have so far come across who claims there is a demand for them is the company which plans to lease the area from the Royal Parks and hire out the pitches privately. And even if there is demand, I don't see why the pitches have to be in one of our precious Parks.
It's the rubber crumb that really puts me off. There is little enough space with living vegetation in the concrete desert of London as it is. Not only does vegetation produce oxygen to breathe, but also in hot weather it is cooler than elsewhere and at all times of year it soothes the soul. None of these are true of rubber crumb.
Albert and I adjourned to a pub for refreshments and got talking about science fiction. Turns out that we are both keen Philip K. Dick fans. A particularly good read is The World Jones Made, in which liberal values are taken to their logical extreme. Then someone leads a backlash. He is a precog, but the trouble is that he can't see far enough ahead. Bizarre, astonishing - the author was a genius.
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