London, Blue Nun, and Route 23

Route 23? Of course it is!

The news that London has returned once more to its iconic double-deckers pleases me no end. Every time I’ve been in the smoke in the last ten years things have changed, inevitably you’ll say, and you’d be right, but in little ways. The Shard for example, set up entirely to make sure the Rockingham Estate is always, even at night, in the shade. But with busses I’ve missed them not being there and so with their return I’ll be thankfully saved from missing what replaced them. Bear in mind I still don’t know what an oyster card does, and somewhere not so very deep inside I’m still wondering where the smoking carriage went on the tube trains.

                          This all bodes very well for the future. With the Olympics coming to London, and my own part reluctantly agreed to in the opening ceremony. I am assured that already people working in the city do so once more in bowler hats (developed to act as a helmet for gamekeepers), pin-stripe trousers and with a furled umbrella balanced by a copy of The Times. Even now I look forward to roaring over Tower Bridge in a nippy little MG painted with the union flag, almost certainly with a helicopter keeping chase to catch the footage of me, my mightily cheek-bewhiskered driver and a pair of young swingers in the back, ideally ageless Hammer actresses. Young Guards officers will be caught with a bit of rough in Green Park. I shall stay in a well-appointed pad where a party shall always be in full blow and where being middle-aged I will somehow be very groovy, and probably solve mysteries.

                          Ah, London. We’ll toast you with Blue Nun, drunk from a shoe, provided by Christine Kieller, on a bet with Terrance Stamp, in Ladbroke Grove, and eat breakfast at the Mountain Grill, in smart clobber, where Peter Cook will be the devil, incarnate.

                          It will, won’t it? 

                          Yeah, it will. Course it will.