Walk to work

Last night as I walked home from work, I walked past the NY Giants and Miami Dolphins tour coach (they played at Wembley Stadium on Sunday, in a bid to generate interest in “American Football” over here). There weren’t any football players hanging out on the bridge, so my guess is that they were down at the river, catching a Shakespearean play at the new replica Globe. There’s a thought.

Seeing the coach got me thinking about the strange things I’ve seen on Southwark Bridge. It’s a far more eventful bridge than, say, Blackfriars, which is the bridge I used to walk across to get to my old job.

Last week there was a massive raft stuck against one of the piles of the bridge (and I mean massive – you could probably have parked about 40 cars on it). At first, I thought it was just stuck. There was a full-sized shovel (the kind Uncle Rick uses) on the raft. The next day it was still there, and the shovel was depositing boulders at the foot of the piles in the river. ??

In the morning, I regularly see police motorcades escorting massive armoured vehicles to the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court (pictured). One evening as I was walking home, I saw a flotilla of police boats on the river, and police cars on the bridge, where a police chase had led to a woman trying to jump into the river to get away. Unfortunately, she missed the river, and landed on the concrete steps of a building fronting the river.

This morning I saw the usual police motorcade escorting prisoners North to the Old Bailey. (I looked up the trial listing when I got into work, and then found a newspaper article: “A troublesome tenant was stabbed and battered to death in his bedsit after police ignored his landlord's threat to kill him, a court heard”. Six Sikh men, including the landlord, are on trial.) And then immediately after that – so close in time that I thought they’d just turned around and come back – another police motorcade came by, going South. But instead of armoured vehicles, the motorcade was escorting Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, in his Jag. I would not have been certain of this (although I thought I saw Gordon) if I hadn’t seen the news 15 minutes later as I walked into the office. The BBC was broadcasting live from down the road from my flat, where Gordon Brown was getting out to make a speech....

I have to confess that I had a brief Calvin and Hobbes moment where I fantasised about what would have happened if the motorcades, which were going over the same bridge in opposite directions, had collided. I tell you what, Gordon Brown would have made short work of those prisoners.