Feeling My Age

Talking of redemption a couple of days ago, my wife helped run a camping holiday in the Hebrides last month with a group of teenagers and adult staff.  From the photos it looks like it was was all good cold, clean fun and everyone had – if not a whale of a time – then at least a seal of a time. Apart from the last day when it fell to Wife to organise everyone into teams to do the clearing up.
She gave each team a name corresponding to the amount of work involved: Misery, Drudgery, Servitude, Penitence, Purgatory, Hellfire and – for the lucky ones on the relatively light cooking duty – Redemption.

The garden’s full of newly fledged starlings almost as big as their parents – and equally capable of feeding at our bird table. But this one still follows its mum/dad around yelling to have the food shoved down its beak. And, with enough nagging, the parent eventually gives in…

West End Central police station in Savile Row. In the late 60s some of the guys who turned up at the Priory had been habitutués of The Dilly – either as rent boys – or as purveyors and consumers of hash, acid, methedrine and heroin. Or both. In any case any teenager regularly loitering around Picadilly Circus was pretty much certain to end up sooner or later at West End Central. My friends reserved a particular fear and loathing for the building and its officers. Once inside you were utterly at their mercy which – by their account – was in short supply.