Mornington Crescent?!

[Eggsbutnobacon]

Will somebody please please explain to me what this is all about?

Oh Maud! How you bear up under these familial burdens is truly a lesson to us all. I certainly hope to emulate your exceptional fortitude when Mummy Pingu's 6th husband is finally allowed into the country. It's not that he was actually detained by the border police, you understand, just that he had some interesting matters to discuss with them.

From Bounds Green one must surely hasten onwards to

Turnpike Lane

I thik we can all see where I'm planing to go from there, I only hope one of you has the elan to see it through...

A slight of play there Pingu, but I will forgive as I am homeward bound.

Forget it Pingu - what you are planning is (a) blatantly obvious (b) mildly immoral and not even in a pleasurable way and (c) impossible until Borehamwood shall come to Dunsinane, and the line is closed because of a duff signal in Cleethorpes.

But I have seen the email traffic about husband 6 and my advice is that you hie you to Heathrow Terminal 5 without delay. Toot-sweet. He's found those photos of the Permanent Secretary's sister and the goat in Amman and his passage through Immigration will be swift and easy.

At least make him feel welcome. Hospitality is the art of making people feel at home when you wish they were!

I knew I should have gone to bed earlier sleight and London Bridge*

I shall make the short trip that is almost impossible because of the torture of the station works and so have to play the 1948 rule and move to Charing Cross. Just around the corner from the Playhouse Theatre, famed in the Good Old Days and I am sure visited by the Brigadier and maybe even Maud.

elephant you cannot possibly be en route for MC, unless it be a very circuitous one given pingu's ill-timed and disgraceful last play. With the Brigadier detained, the Patagonian Ambassador has stepped in as reserve and points out that with the Moon in Capricorn, the only move acceptable to the United Nations and the grand council has to be Embankment.

And of course from Embankment this being Saturday we have to North of the Trent. Carlisle beckons!

I really don't know why everyone picks on innocent, blameless moi. I am, of course, devoted to the thee-ay-ter and like nothing more than an soiree with Strindberg, but to suggest that I would pass an evening with the Brigadier in a louche dive is really de trop.

So, in hommage to the Swedish bard,

Stockholm Central

Excusé moi but I believe the Good Old Days were filmed slightly North of Charing Cross, so therefore from sunny Stockholm I hie to Leeds.

Maud your portrait of yourself as a poor picked-on innocent is about as plausible as Lady Thatcher claiming to be a Socialist. We all know better, especially since you tried to play a Cross-transverse from the Third to the Fifth line of the Paris Metro and tied up the S-Bahn for days on end.

Leeds is good but we need somewhere quiet for Saturday night and the obvious (nay the only) place is Ripon.

As someone who actually has had a night with a Brigadier in a louche dive, I feel confident in playing a double deployment in full combat fatigues from Ripon to Doncaster.

Well, if we've dressing up in military fatigues, the next move has to be a Subaltern's Substantive to

Catterick

Oooh, haven't seen a Subaltern's since '23 in Lisbon, when the Dowager Duchess stole the game from under the whiskered nose of the Lord Ffortescue, and then ran off with the under footman.
Staying with the military, let's us march in double time to Aldershot

dementedma I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings but somebody has to tell you. Your "Brigadier" was an impostor. I know where the louche dive was - but in the interests of world peace I will not say - and I fear it was the Mayor of the principal port city of that country. In a dim light his robes look a bit like the uniform you thought you saw - not that you saw it for long - and they must have made a vivid contrast with what you were wearing unless you had changed since the heats of the Oldies and Goldies earlier in the day when you slipped up by playing Westbourne Park in error for Plaistow - the sort of elementary blunder we all make sometimes but which I am not making when I say: Time for a change to the Senior Service and off we go to Faslane.

These last posts are bringing back happy memories of the time I had my hair cropped and went to the Trafalgar Ball in the guise of a cadet, only to be outed when I forgot that naval officers are bound by tradition to play the Jutland variation when the Bakerloo line is high.

Portsmouth

Pass the port to left or is it to the right? Pregnant ladies to sit near the door, in case of needed toilet breaks, and to wear full evening dress but cover their shoulders at dinner. Lard sculptures adorning the tables. Ahh! I remember it well. Aldershot.

Ah, Aldershot! Well worth playing twice in 4 moves - although I don't think elephant actually intended to play the Military 2-Step, but a classy move executed by accident remains a classy move even if the player in question has clearly been consuming the Rear Admiral's bathtub gin by the pint since 10am

Did you know that the really top-notch MC play in Aldershot actually happened in the enlisted men's Mess? The was a young Private from ABrnsley, I believe, who pulled off the most incredible Quadruple Heffington Sleight that I've ever seen. I often wonder what happened to that chap. Such raw MC talent one rarely sees.

Ah, memory lane - if only there were a station on the same name. I'll go for

Hangar Lane instead, as it's always been terribly evocative for me.

That lad from Barnsley was at once commissioned into a unit so secret that even its own officers don't know it exists and is now a Major.

But it wasn't a Heffington - it was a Fotheringham. It's an easy mistake to make especially when you are as pickled as Irene was at that Trafalgar Ball and if anything that made it even more impressive - the more so as he started from Totnes.

From Hanger Lane historic inevitability leads to Tyburn and to Marble Arch

Rail replacement or whatever mode of transport is allowed under the closure rule to Bond Street as the Central line is partly shut today. Probably a few northerners still in the area after the shenanigans at Wembley yesterday evening- some even without a hat, which in my youth was social death, especially when going to watch association football.

This idea of pianos to play at stations which I saw when passing through St Pancras should catch on- i am sure that Maud can do a wonderful afternoon of cabaret singing, accompanied on the piano, to entertain us all. No need to go to Koko which is over the road from MC for entertainment.

Alas, my cabaret career ended with the closure of Madame Jojo's. The audience there were always most appreciative of my Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata played on kazoo and musical saw. I always used to get a warm hand on my entrance.

For now, the most entertaining thing I can offer is a reverse Trumpington to

Alperton

Nothing to beat a warm hand on one's entrance I feel.
I think a literary note is required, and as we can travel feely today under the Willoughby Waiver until the sun is over the yardarm, I take us in a dreamy diversion to Manderlay.

By which, or course, I meant Manderlay. The wretched junior gardener upon whose buttocks this contention rests, wriggled at an inappropriate time, causing a mis-spelling.

Fuck it!!!! MANDERLEY. Stop auto correcting you illiterate piece of technological shite!

And I think you meant contraption.

In memory of Les Miserables - and I mean the novel - Montreuil-sur-Mer.

I would suggest you give the under-gardener a good spanking but the rest of the staff would only queue up for a share.

Going other worldly, but still in a literary vein, I transport us all to Middle Earth with an Elvish twist to Rivendell