Parliament Hill

This will be a post mostly in pictures, owing to the fact that I managed to burn the finger that does the letters ‘u’, ‘j’, and ‘n’ on a soldering iron, and as a touch typer I’m really not coping well with trying to write with a plaster the size of an elephant’s slipper on my hand.

But!  Parliament Hill.  According to local mythology, it’s named so in honour of the Gunpowder Plotters, who stood on top of it waiting for the Houses of Parliament to blow up in 1605… and were disappointed.  I went walkies there with a technician friend, and studying the maps we reached the rather pleasing conclusion that it could well be possible to walk from Golders Green to Highgate Cemetery with little more than 200m of streetwork all the way.  It juts onto Hampstead Heath, where in the summer it’s more than possible to find people paddling away in the bathing pools (I will not be among them) and where, according to popular cinematic tradition, spies meet to exchange mutual understandings of a shifty kind.  Something which always surprised me, in the sense that it’s a good uphill walk to Parliament Hill, best accessed by Overground, and thus rather inconvenient for any agent who is based in Vauxhall or Cheapside… but who are we to question the rigors of espionage?  Dog walkers are another universal norm, and once the weather warms up, picnicking and kite flying are among some of my very few childhood memories of the place.  On a good day, you can see all the way across London to the South Downs, and looking north towards Highgate it’s a useful reminder of the fact that London, while mostly flat, is essentially built in a river valley, though the river itself was long lost behind the houses and towers of the city below.