Grace’s guided Tour of London

The Bands have finished playing in the London Parks now – summer is almost come and gone again!  Still, when I feel I am near to suffering from Brass Band Malnutrition I can always pop up on a Sunday morning to the Barracks just across from Buckingham Palace and listen to the Band play there while the Guards are being inspected and shouted at etc.  I think the next time I do that I will take my tape recorder along with me.  Ah! Yes! That is something new since I last wrote.  You see when I was in Bristol a month or so ago – it must have been end of July – someone mentioned to me that a mutual friend had been a bit depressed and I said I would drop them a line to cheer them up – which I did in due course.  A week or so later I received a reply in the shape of a tape, which as I had no tape recorder was rather like having a full pack of cigarettes and not a match in the house ….or, a full bottle of wine and no cork screw!  So, I had a word in Kelvin’s ear in the office and he ordered a tape recorder for me from his catalogue for £28, or thereabouts, and I had to wait another week until it arrived to hear what was on the tape.  Then, of course, I had to go out and buy a tape on which to reply!  This is far more difficult than you would at first imagine – or at least I found it jolly difficult to ‘talk’ a letter non-stop for 45 minutes which is how long the first side ran.  The second side I decided to use up by taking my friend on a ‘Grace’s guided Tour of London’ sub-titled ‘And the Best of British Luck’.  It was done very much with my tongue in my cheek and, I suppose, rather facetiously.  I started off with an early morning walk to the Station and recorded the train ride into the City – you know, the clickety-clack bit because I know this particular person likes railways! – culminating in the Platform Announcements at London Bridge, “The Train now at Platform 6 is for Waterloo East and Charing Cross ONLY”.  There was no talking on this part of the tape – just the external sounds ‘to give atmosphere’.  The next part of Grace’s tour took us to the Bunhill Burial Grounds, opposite Wesley’s Chapel in the City Road, where I proceeded to describe the various tomb stone.  I did say at this point that I might go to Moorgate Mortuary afterwards – but said I had decided against this as I didn’t want to bore my friend STIFF!  I know, I hang my head in shame at such an awful pun!

At another stage I said I was now very comfortably off and felt I needn’t worry about the future with so much money behind me ….I was at the time standing on the pavement with my back to the Bank of England!  By then I had become rather footsore and cheated for the rest of the tape by going to the Victoria Embankment Gardens and sitting listening to the Band of the Coldstream Guards and recording their final music.  The little bit of tape that was left I used up with my Mum playing her Concertina and a bit of the Mozart Horn Concerto I have on record.  It was certainly great fun doing it but it was far more time consuming than just typing a letter in the office, where I can fit it in between work.  Doing a tape means I have to break into my precious ‘spare time’ of which I never seem to have enough.  I could do with a ten day week – or maybe a three day weekend would be a good start.

Grace Russ - 20th Sep 1979