This is one of London’s mainline stations. It’s the home of the Great Western Railway and the place from where the Penzance train sets off on its journey to my beautiful, wild home. I have to confess to a fairly strong liking for quite a number of the London stations – this one has some lovely Victorian iron architecture. Liverpool Street too, if you can forgive the ghastly 1970s messing about that it had, still has some wonderful features. Waterloo is also a fave but the best for me, despite its shabby, depressing interior is the lavish, gothic building that is St Pancras….for many years, I laboured under the misapprehension that it was called St Pancreas and was a trifle embarrassed to find it wasn’t named after an internal organ after all! St Pancras is made even more beautiful when you compare it to its neighbour – the decidedly un-lovely Kings Cross.
Paddington is of course where Paddington Bear was found, duffle-coated and Wellington booted up, clutching marmalade sandwiches and with a sign around his neck saying ‘please look after this bear’.
Paddington was a sad, lonely little creature when he was found by Mr and Mrs Brown and he reminds me of a rather bizarre experience I had this morning. Ginny and I were on the way to the office in a seemingly completely normal morning, when we turned into the road where the entrance to our underground car park is and came face-to-face with a police car and an ambulance blocking our way. There was clearly a ‘body’ lying in the street and we both experienced the same stomach-churning moment – ‘oh no, please not one of our colleagues or friends’…. I suppose that was more than a bit selfish because the person could have been someone else’s friend, lover, husband or father – perhaps all of these.
We beat a hasty retreat and parked in the public car park across the road doing our best not to look ghoulishly at the scene. Inside our building it was confirmed that the person on the road was a man and not anyone we ‘know’. Phew.
Later it transpired that the man had been loitering for a while outside the building and was drunk. When his (now presumably ex) girlfriend drove down the street, he launched himself off the kerb in front of her car. Luckily, she stopped in time not to hit him.
The poor chap was eventually declared not to be in need of any medical treatment so he was handcuffed and carted off to the police station up the road a few hundred yards.
One can only imagine what it was that had led to this act of stupidity/desperation/drunken rage, whatever it was that made him do it, I doubt very much whether it endeared him to the woman involved. I suppose we’ll never know. I was reminded throughout this episode, of that wonderful book by Ian Mcewan. Enduring Love. That book started with a brutal chance event that completely changed the by-standers’ lives. That novel is one of the most powerful I have read in the last ten years or so. Even accounting for the fact I’ve been wedded to a paperback diet of fluffy stuff recently, I’ve still read lots of books of ‘substance’ overall in that time and Enduring Love is right up there with the best of the best (such as the exquisite Snow Falling on Cedars and The Map of Love) for me.
The whole episode was certainly a gut-wrenching start to my day, which had its own peaks and troughs like a roller-coaster. Still, at least my last meeting went well and I had a successful outcome. Roll-on tomorrow’s joys and pains – I am beginning to feel up to the fray again….sooner or later there has to be a light at the end of the tunnel….maybe that day will be tomorrow?
Last year, we were making a stand for Liberty!
