Monday, April 21, 2008

Errors

If you live in London then you might have seen the adverts for the forthcoming mayoral election that are basically telling people that they should find out where their polling station is and not just rely on stumbling across it on the day. Well, as it turns out, my own council doesn’t know where my polling station is. A few weeks ago I got my polling card which said that my polling station was at the school along the road from where I live. Then on Friday I got a letter from my council saying that they had made a mistake and actually that isn’t my polling station and it is in fact about a 15 minute walk from where I live. Oops. I guess, at least they realised in advance. I was planning on voting on the way into work but I don’t think I’ll have time to get to the polling station and into work at a reasonable time, so I might have to wait until the evening. Grrrr…

Anyway, it was quite good weekend – despite getting a quote for fitting a new boiler which is for £3400!!!! I went to my uncle’s house on Saturday to celebrate his birthday. To get there I had to go to St Pancras, which is where the Eurostar departs from. I wasn’t actually heading for the continent and was using one of the domestic platforms, but from what I saw of the station, I thought it was pretty impressive. It was a pleasant enough afternoon, despite one of my cousin’s being as irritating as ever. He is about 8 years old and is a militant vegetarian. He is happy to point out to people how disgusting they are for eating meat and my uncle told me that they had recently been to an aquarium, which my cousin had enjoyed, but then there were some stuffed animals and my cousin was so horrified when he saw a stuffed polar bear that my uncle had to cover his son’s eyes to escort him out of the exhibition because he could not look at it. I know stuffing animals is not a great thing to do (although having said that, there is a very funny scene in Alan Alda’s biography “Never have your dog stuffed” about the after effects of his childhood dog having been stuffed which I thought was very funny) but my cousin has no middle ground in any of his thinking and if he doesn’t like something you certainly know it… He’s always a challenge.

Yesterday I met up with G and we went for lunch at Wagamama’s and then had a wander in the National Gallery and around the local area up to Piccadilly and then had a cup of tea and a bit of cake before heading home. All very civilised and there was a nice bit of sunshine to go with it all too. Very pleasant.

2 comments:

Kahless said...

I went on Eurostar last month and I found St Pancreas extremely impressive. So much so I took so photo's!

Stuffed animals give me the heebie jeebies to cousin has good taste.

Random Reflections said...

kahless - oh yes, I'd forgotten that. I thought the glass roof was very impressive, but must explore it a bit more some time.

If you feel like that about stuffed animals, it's probably best to avoid parts of the Natural History Museum - particularly the bits where they used to hunt the animals so they could appear in a glass cabinet.