Wednesday, October 22, 2003
Stupid things I've done after dark on Monday nights, part 1
(or: Mum, you should probably skip this one.)
No, really, you'll just worry.
So, a week ago Monday I needed to get a text for one of my courses. The on-campus Waterstones was sold out, but the Imperial College branch had four. Aside: don't they have a great url? Ick! Ack! Uk! After my very long day of classes (more on this soon) I took the tube to South Kensington, found the bookstore, and bought the text five minutes before they closed at 7 pm. Great, no problem, no stupidity yet.
Imperial College is just a few blocks south of Kensington Gardens. I live less than a block north of Kensington Gardens. Until I get my student travel card (should be arriving in the mail soon), I've been buying carnets of single zone 1 tickets, as that's way cheaper than day passes and mostly I'm just going back and forth to school once a day. I bored you with that info to explain this: it was a waste of £1.10 to use a ticket to get home from Imperial, and since there are no direct links, it would have been a waste of time too.
So I headed north to the park, and then west a bit. I was planning to walk around the park, but when I reached the entrance to the path that leads straight to my place on the other side, there were other people, runners and commuters, walking in and out. My bag was getting very heavy. Taking the path was the shortest route. Besides all the other normal-looking park walkers providing a sense of safety, the path is wide, the trees aren't close enough to it to be sheltering crazy serial killers, nothing bad could happen, right?
You may disagree, but I decided the path was a good idea. Lalala, walked along it, no problems until I reached my exit and the gate was locked. I went east to the next exit, and it was locked too. At the next gate, another woman was just coming back from it headed to check out the gate I'd just found locked.
We turned and went west, gathering three more locked-in-the-park-after-dark people. A gate or two on, one of them noticed that the brick wall next to the gate, though topped with spiky iron bits like the rest of the wall, could be climbed because the hill rose beside the gate to make getting on the brick part feasible, and the iron part was just short enough that you could straddle it without impaling yourself if your legs were long enough. Which mine were. So if you're ever locked in the Kensington Gardens/Hyde Park, head for the exit on Bayswater just west of Queensway. Midgets are hooped, unless they're less than 15 cm in diameter and can squeeze through the gates.
Mum, if you've read this far, the whole thing was really okay -- it was only around 7:30, and I had my mobile phone, so if all else failed I could have called the flatmates to rescue me. But you probably shouldn't have read Dennis Lee to me at an impressionable age.
