INDIAN SPRING

It was half-past seven in the morning.  I was in St James’s Park, just off the Mall and Horse Guards Parade, London.  It was a cheerful crisp spring day and I felt as fresh as a newly-boiled lobster. A slight haze sat like a diaphanous veil over the sun.  The morning was cool, but the day promised to become unseasonably warm, as it has done for days now.  The trees were full of birdsong, and one bird sat in a maple tree above my head squeaking and squawking to its heart’s content. It sounded like Percy Edwards being throttled with a ligature. 
The park is on the flight path, so every thirty seconds or so an aeroplane roared past overhead. I wondered when and where they jettisoned the sewage.  The terrace of the café where I was sitting was quite busy.  There was a phalanx of touring cyclists, clad in lycra, teardrop helmets and wrap-around Ray-Bans showing off in the far corner.  They looked like extras from ‘Blakes’ 7’. A posh, middle-aged woman paid for her cup of coffee with a credit-card.  She told the incredulous pimply youth serving her “Ay’m sorry, but ay haven’t gort any carsh with me.’ 
Joggers kept loping past, spoiling the flow of my concentration.  They cleared their throats and spat every ten seconds or so, a fulsome flow of spittle, some of which was intercepted by their vests before it reached the ground. They responded by pressing their fingers against their noses and snorting some mucous to join the spittle.  I reflected that three hundred years ago they had locked you up for less. 
A bald man on a bicycle drifted past.  He had his right foot up on the crossbar and was cycling only with his left.  I wondered if he had an artificial leg, but came to the eventual conclusion that he was just bonkers, like most of the people round there. For example, in the grass on the bank of the lake, there was a coven of a dozen or so young people lifting dumb-bells up and down. Their leader yelled “To the left – twist!” and they obeyed.  “To the right – twist!” They lurched to the right in the manner of Corporal Jones and, in so doing, one idiot dropped his dumb-bell and it missed his neighbour’s foot by three inches. They ended up in such a ridiculous position that I was reminded of that doyen of popular songs – the Goodies’ “I’m a Teapot.” 
Eventually, time moved me on, and I had to quit my fascinating vantage-point from which I could watch those cockney rebels from behind the rim of my coffee-cup.  I set off for Baker Street to seek the stamping-ground of the Great Detective, and left the mallards and barnacle geese to their own devices.  I was happy, in a small way, to have seen yet another slice of London Life.