Our lovely teacher, John, is more than patient with us.  At the end of the session we sit on the sofas and we enjoy ten minutes of meditation and relaxation.

Contrast this relaxing hour with a frustrating conversation that I just “enjoyed” with a young sergeant at the Metropolitan Police Directorate of Professional Standards.  Some of you will remember the state visit when the President of China  and his Lady wife were wined and dined and feted by The Royal Family and Parliament and others at the end of October.  By chance I was in London on the afternoon that China’s First Lady Madame Liyuan was visiting Fortismere Secondary School.  I stopped to see why there were so many police cars and uniformed officers on a suburban street that I knew well and why police outnumbered spectators by about ten to one.  There were about ten of us and forty police!  I was rudely spoken to by a bearded officer who demanded that I move away from the area as I was  apparently ” attracting too much attention to myself”! When I refused to leave but offered to cross to the other side of the road he told me that I would probably be asked to move away from the area again . All very strange.  In the event I complained, in writing,  to the Met Standards office and received an apology from the a desk sergeant who confirmed that he had investigated the Islington police contingent (I had spoken to a number of friendly police from Islington and discovered that police had been drafted in from a number of areas for this event) and that none of the Islington officers were bearded but the sergeant assured me that “lessons had been learned”! Not good enough for me as until the officer who had harassed me is identified he will have not “learnt a lesson” and is just as likely to be officious and heavy handed when he is next drafted in to “control” ten members of the law abiding public.

I wrote a second letter on 3rd December and, even allowing for Christmas holidays, decided to chase up why my sergeant had not found out where the other officers had come from and of these which was “the bearded one”. When I called the Met number the sergeant answered on the first ring and we had a full discussion and he immediately apologised for not following up and making the very few calls and emails to the central resource department which would very quickly have established which officers were sent to police the visit of Madame Liyuan.  He also conceded that he should have done this straight away and not just relied on my telling him that some officers came from Islington.  I offered to ring central resources for him to find out which divisions had sent which officers on the day! He laughed and said that he was wrong in not having done this at the time and would send out emails today.  I was concerned that bearded officers might have changed their fashion and now be clean shaven. He thought that police officers were not that fashion conscious.  We shall see. I also told him that this investigative policing couldn’t be as difficult as tracking down a murderer…….he laughed and agreed and again stated that he should have acted at the time to find out who was on duty and reiterated that the emails will go out now and that he hoped to get back to me very soon.

I am not holding my breath but my printer is stacked with paper and ink and another letter will be on its way by the end of the month.  It’s a slow day  at theGables – mores the pity for Sergeant A. D.