Manor House Grounds, Southall

Manor House Grounds, Southall - View 1 (view larger image in Flickr).

Thanks to the Southall-Norwood Trust making a complete pig's ear of my appointment (they had it in the system as being at 11am, but the letter I received said 11.30am - as a result, it has been rescheduled to January, a full TWO YEARS after I was first referred to the trust), I found myself at 11.40 this morning a) absolutely furious and flaming mad, and b) with some time to go for a walk to try to calm down.

So I decided to take a wander round the Manor House Grounds, just a hundred yards away from the Trust offices.

It's quite a small park, but it was a gorgeously clear, sunny day, and the park was deserted. I wandered round, taking photographs, and gradually calming down.

Had an interesting chat with a couple of the park staff - they were intrigued to see someone taking photographs, and we got on to talking about the history of the manor itself, and exchanging bits of information about it that we'd picked up.

That ordinary little chat helped me a lot too - it reminded me that not everyone is as incompetent and uncaring as the Southall-Norwood Trust staff seem to be, and brought me back to everyday normality.

And now I think about it, if the Trust hadn't messed up my appointment, I wouldn't have felt I had the time to wander round the park and take lots of beautiful photographs, so even that wasn't all bad.

Still feel angry about it though.