Jimmy Wilds, The Signals, The ITC and BCS
I had a bit of a weekend. As it’s now (by 23 minutes) Wednesday I suppose I should probably get something down before it becomes even more fadey in my fadey brain than it already is. First up – Saturday: The Lord Mayor’s Parade.
My BCS involvement sometimes gets me into slightly random things, but I think this was the most random – marching in the Lord Mayor’s Parade as part of a group consisting of two BCS members (me and Mike), two BCS HQ staff, the robed senior members of the IT Company (the 100th livery company of The City of London, formerly known as the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists) and a group of Royal Signals soldiers, riding 5 display motorbikes (1 with sidecar, 2 with ladders attached to the pillion for doing headstands on), and a quad bike.
The chap in the picture above is Jimmy Wilds, a retired Signals soldier who rode as a dispatch rider for Winston Churchill during the second world war. For some reason Claire Balding decided to talk to him as we rolled past the Bank of England, rather than me and my green fleece clad BCS chums. You can just about see me at the back of the group turning the corner at 55:20 in the BBC Coverage, before Jimmy’s interview. That almost makes me famous – please join the queue if you wish to touch the hem of my cloak.
And then it rained.
Luckily the BCS fleeces were waterproof, but the lunch stop was miserable, with pouring rain and some dodgy Asda sarnies. Me, Mike and the robed up Information Technologists tried to get into a hotel bar for a restorative, but were turned away (which we suspect may have ramifications for the hotel’s business…). I was blaming the fact that I assumed the staff thought the robes were team colours, but I’m suspecting that bloody mindedness may have had something to do with it. Without brandy the restart wasn’t quite so jolly, but the walk back to London Wall felt much shorter and soon we were tucking into the ICT’s wine cellar and hearing tales of the livery companies.
And then it stopped raining.
It’s very strange waving at thousands of people who have lined the streets despite the rain. It’s especially strange when they are pretty much all ignoring you and instead wowing at the rather impressive sounding motorbikes that are making roaring noises behind you. The bikes did sound really rather nice though.
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Posted: November 18th, 2009 under blog.