21 April 2016, 6.45 am
Time for a run. Regent’s Park is wide awake with blossom and bud, some bold and blousy, some still tentative like half-open curtains. I run past the early starters at the coffee shops, rough and stubbly with caffeine (them, not me); dodge the street-cleaners; narrowly miss being swept away by the never-ending flow of cyclists that swells and ebbs to the rhythm of the traffic lights. Geese honk at me and pigeons peck irrelevantly by my feet, but I am used to Council meetings so I hardly notice. All is right with the world. What better way to relax after having spoiled several law students’ afternoons yesterday? 21 April 2016, 12.30 pm And what better way to wind myself up again than to take a taxi ride on the CIPA account? The driver appears to know London even less well than I do, which I realise when we go past the same place twice and that it is the place where he picked me up ten minutes ago. We subsequently visit Bloomsbury Square twice as well. We are headed for Southwark. If you have a map of London, you can find Southwark somewhere between a long way from Bloomsbury Square, and Kent. The driver’s satnav is set to perform a loop algorithm, which is: locate traffic jam; arrive at traffic jam; abort; return to starting point. This sequence makes the driver angry, so he sounds his horn to tell other drivers to stop being traffic jams. The temperature in the car goes up. What makes me angry is that when we finally arrive somewhere near where I am aiming for, he tells me he has run out of ideas for getting any closer. He parks up and chivalrously allows me out to drag my suitcase through a high-class office precinct, asking random strangers the way to the building I need. I am late for my meeting. Despite this, before I set off I make time to tell the taxi driver how much I’ve enjoyed my journey today, which I express in negative numbers and powers of ten.
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