Week 261: Rover

The lower kitchen cupboards here have a sort of “false back”. I think it’s bad design – inefficient use of space – and not a deliberate feature. There’s a gap at the top through which you could drop things like cash and secret documents, but then you’d need an exceptionally long bendy arm to retrieve them. It means an enemy could seek revenge by secreting (which here means “concealing”, not “excreting”) prawns without the needlework associated with sewing them into the curtains, so I’d better not upset anyone who has access to the kitchen cupboards.

Wednesday morning, pottering, heard a helicopter overhead. Looked at the AirNav RadarBox app, which seems to filter out fewer aircraft than other apps do, and by jingo it was a royal helicopter that flown from Kensington Palace and was now disturbing my breakfast. According to local press, in the helicopter was Prince Richard the Duke of Gloucester, who was visiting a local homelessness charity (to which I maintain a monthly direct debit, despite one of their vans once mounting a pavement and making me think I was getting run over, because I’m generous and not petty or vindictive). But hang on a minute, Prince Richard the Duke of Gloucester? It’s troubling that there’s a whole prince who’s been princing around all my life and I’ve never heard of him, like when you notice a building you’ve never noticed before.

Yard Act (h). (“Half Man Half Biscuit for thick people”, but actually not that at all.)

Some rap artists confusingly call Range Rovers Rovers, so I wondered if the Rover mentioned in Fixer Upper (which they didn’t play) was really a Range Rover too, but no apparently it’s a Rover 200. (Although these days, Range Rovers have replaced Rovers as the car of choice for certain kinds of people, e.g. the prime minister and Alan Partridge.)

In London (Westfield Stratford), not for the first time, I found myself rolling up a sleeve and bravely reaching into a public toilet bowl to unblock a blockage (and then of course washing my hands and arm so thoroughly that I might have looked like an actual germophobe). It was busy, and I’d entered the cubicle and seen the blockage and hesitated, and the longer I hesitated the more I couldn’t leave without it looking like I’d caused the blockage, so really I had no choice … but I’m also just a conscientious legend who’s great.