Beware the heather sellers - take two

It seems things have changed in Covent Garden. Since my post entitled ‘Beware the heather sellers’ from about this time last year, it appears London Mayor Ken Livingstone (or Sheriff Ken as the locals like to call him) may have done to the heather selling small business people of Romany extraction as he did to the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, i.e made them disappear… Now I cannot be sure the lack of ‘cultural colour’ I experienced during my most recent visit Covent Garden last September is Ken’s fault or whether the purveyors of fine hand made goods have simply moved on to pastures new, an inherent part of an nomadic lifestyle of course, so I am not wishing to implicate him in the changed situation, I am just theorizing.

I will just say that this time I didn’t came away from the place without unwanted bunches of overpriced flora.

What year is it again?

So another year dawns. It came round a bit quick in my opinion, wasn’t it just a couple of months ago we were doing this before? It makes me think about all of the other New Years that have come and gone – the memories of which seem to be accumulating at a great rate in the recycling bin in my mind. It won’t be long now until they overflow and bury me in a landslide of old age. I’ll say to myself “What happened to my life?” The older I get the more I dislike the New Years celebration. What good is it but another reminder of your own mortality? Maybe we should just stop right here and go no further – it can remain 2007 indefinitely. This New Years Eve a group of people in Nantes, France held a small protest. They didn’t want to go into 2007 but to stay in 2006. Apparently they chanted: "No to 2007" and "Now is better!" whilst demanding ‘governments and the UN to stop time's "mad race" and declare a moratorium on the future.' (according the to the BBC news website).

I think I might have joined them had I been there. As you may have guessed it didn’t work and 2007 arrived relatively unperturbed by this group of hopeful, but ultimately misguided, French.

Oh well, I am sure the next 363 days will soon pass and well be doing it all over again.