The Royal Mile runs from the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle, way down the hill to Holyrood Palace and the Scottish Parliament - all the way from the peak of Edinburgh's most central extinct volcano, which looms impressively over the city's main shopping street, to the foot of the next volcano along - the elephantine Arthur's Seat.

Roughly the top third of the street is cobbled, and packed with the most egregious tartan tat imaginable - tourist kilts, souvenir whiskies, and a shop dedicated to the Loch Ness Monster... that most Scottish of beasties, whose home after all is less than a hundred and seventy miles away to the north. At Festival time, most of this section is pedestrianised and filled to heaving with performers, flyerers and above all tourists. It's quite fun for a while, if you have a high tolerance for gawping crowds, but for the most part the city's residents either steer well clear or get very good at avoiding contact with anyone while declining promotional material as efficiently as possible.

Like many Edinburgh roads the Royal Mile changes name every couple of hundred yards, presumably to befuddle any invaders or other visiting foreigners. From top to bottom it goes from being the Castle Esplanade to Castle Hill, Lawnmarket, High Street and then Canongate. It is at least blessed with a single overarching name though, which even appears on some road signs - this is in contrast to most many-titled Edinburgh streets, like the bafflingly seven-named road which is called North Bridge (or possibly South Bridge) when it intersects with the Royal Mile.

Most of the touristry is confined to Lawnmarket and the High Street - as you head down towards Canongate it slowly gives way to some quite interesting shops, little museums, and institutions like the Scottish Book Trust and the Storytelling Centre. All the way down, you get closes coming off on either side, often with their own fascinating histories and places to visit, where you can head downhill even more steeply on foot.

Like so much of Edinburgh there is an astonishing amount of really gorgeous architecture to be seen here, as well as some rather fine statues. The Castle, The Hub, St Giles' Cathedral and the old John Knox house are particularly worth seeing, but there's plenty more that you'll miss if you don't stop and raise your eyes well above the shop fronts from time to time. Right at the bottom is the very pretty, fairytale-ish Palace, and next to it the controversial parliament building, which tends to divide people firmly into 'Love' and 'Hate Hate Hate' camps. For my part I actually like quite a lot of it, from up close, but the overall impression it gives is nevertheless a formless hodgepodge of concrete and barred windows. It's fascinating, in a sense, that they managed to spend £414 million of public money on something that ended up looking like that, but aside from that it I consider it one of the less interesting buildings on a street with so much history and beauty.

Bigotgate was the name given to the political scandal that briefly held the attention of the British public on the 28th April 2010, and might or might not have been the defining moment of the 2010 General Election campaign.

With a General Election scheduled to be held in the United Kingdom on the 6th May 2010, the election campaign was in full swing and all was not going well for the incumbent Labour Party. Indeed, according to a number of polls, Labour had been relegated to third place, and appeared to be on course for an historic defeat. Thus on the 24th April it became known that Labour were going to change their election strategy, as they feared that it was about to become a two-horse race between their Conservative and Liberal Democrat rivals. As part of this new strategy, Brown would be making an effort to "meet more ordinary voters", and on Wednesday 28th April 2010 dramatic evidence emerged of what happened when Gordon Brown did indeed make contact with "ordinary voters".

Gordon Brown was campaigning in Rochdale, and being interviewed by James Cook of the BBC, when a "voice in the background" began questioning "where the money was going to come from". The voice belonged to a sixty-six year-old former council worker named Gillian Duffy who had only popped out to buy a loaf of bread, and stumbled across the Prime Ministerial media circus. This attracted the attention of the local Labour candidate Simon Danczuk who went to speak to her. Having established that she was a 'lifelong Labour supporter', Danczuk naturally concluded that she was exactly the kind of 'ordinary voter' that Brown should be making contact with, and a conversation ensued, during which she duly challenged Brown on a "number of issues including immigration and crime". At the conclusion of their conversation, Mrs Duffy told reporters that she had been happy with Brown's responses, said that he "seems a nice man", and that despite the fact that she didn't think he had answered all her questions, she would indeed be voting for him, although without any great enthusiasm it must be said, as she apparently viewed Brown as "the best of a bad bunch".

Mission accomplished one might have imagined, particularly since Mrs Duffy had began by saying that she was "absolutely ashamed of saying I'm Labour". One more Labour supporter reassured, and one more vote in the bag one might have thought, except that after shaking Duffy's hand, and waving at the crowd, Brown then climbed into his car and quite forgot that he still had his Sky News microphone attached and that it was still live. His subsequent remarks as he sat in the car were therefore not quite as confidential as he imagined and turned out to be quite at variance with his previous closing pleasantries. Brown pronounced that his meeting with Mrs Duffy "was a disaster", and that they "should never have put me with that woman". When his aide Justin Forsyth asked what had gone wrong, Brown replied "Oh everything. She was just a sort of bigoted woman that said she used to be Labour. Ridiculous." The issue here being that Mrs Duffy had at one point asked Brown the question, "all these eastern Europeans what are coming in, where are they flocking from?", and it seemed that Brown had therefore concluded that the questioner was some kind of racist for daring to raise the issue of immigration.

As it was, Brown was enroute to an interview with Jeremy Vine to be broadcast on BBC Radio 2, by which time Sky News had already broadcast Brown's candid conversation to a startled nation. By 12.30 pm a rather puzzled Mrs Duffy had herself been played a recording of Brown's candid remarks and described herself as being "very disappointed" and "very upset". She went on to say, "He's an educated person, why has he come out with words like that? He's going to lead this country and he's calling an ordinary woman who's just come up and asked him questions that most people would ask him - they're not doing anything about the national debt and it's going to be tax, tax, tax for another twenty years to get out of this national debt - and he's calling me a bigot. When he was chancellor he did very good things for this country, but now it's all gone to pot, everything. I don't want to speak to him again really. Just give an apology. What was bigoted in that what I said? I just asked about national debt? I am quite shocked. Very shocked." (As could be seen by Mrs Duffy's reactions; it was the issue of the national debt that was at the forefront of her mind, and the fact that she had made a passing reference to the "Eastern Europeans" who were allegedly "flocking" to Rochdale was neither here nor there as far as she was concerned.)

A quarter of an hour later Brown was sitting in the studio being interviewed for the Jeremy Vine Show and was forced to listen to the same recording. The BBC had a camera in the studio and therefore caught his reaction as he realised that his "bigoted woman" remark had been captured for posterity, and his head slumped into his hands as the full enormity of his faux pas sunk in. Initially Brown did his best to squirm his way out of the hole he had dug for himself. "They have chosen to play my private conversation with the person who was in the car with me" he complained, although he did say that he was sorry "if I've said anything like that". (What do you mean 'if' Mr Brown. We've got it on tape.). Once he was out of the studio, Brown then decided to telephone Mrs Duffy to offer his apologies. The BBC contacted her to ask her if she was satisfied with this apology. Her response was; "No, absolutely not. It makes no amends. It makes no difference to me".

Brown therefore felt obliged to rearrange his schedule, and at 3.00 pm turned up at the Duffy household to speak to her in person in a desperate bid to mitigate the damage. After a meeting lasting thirty-nine minutes Brown emerged bearing his trademark forced grin to inform the assembled throng of waiting journalists that she had accepted his apology, as he announced that he was "mortified by what has happened", had offered Mrs Duffy his "sincere apologies", and that he had simply "misunderstood what she said". He was, he said "a penitent sinner" as he explained that, "Sometimes you say things that you don't mean to say, sometimes you say things by mistake and sometimes when you say things you want to correct it very quickly." It was however notable that Mrs Duffy did not appear before the cameras and remained safely indoors. In fact, according to her nephew, Peter Duffy speaking later on BBC Radio 5 Live, she was indeed asked to step outside with Brown but politely refused.

Nevertheless, the 'bigot row' was now the story of the day and dominated the media, with the clip of Brown referring to Gillian Duffy as a "bigoted woman" being endlessly replayed on every television and radio bulletin during the day. It was the same the following Thursday as the story dominated the front pages of the newspapers, as thousands upon thousands of words were devoted to the task of analysing precisely what this meant for the election.

Some people tried spin the story and claim that Brown was simply being honest and the woman was indeed a bigot. However since they were talking about the very same Gordon Brown who had once promised 'British Jobs for British Workers' that seemed a bit rich. Others argued that Brown had misheard her, and that he thought she had said 'fucking' rather than 'flocking', which was a trifle farfetched, although perhaps the prize for creating thinking under pressure should have gone to John Prescott who complained on his blog (in a piece reproduced in The Guardian) that the whole affair was "nothing but a Murdoch plot", and that the Murdoch media empire had "reached a new low in their desperate attempt to turn the election for the Tories", having "broadcast a private conversation between Gordon and his staff". Brown himself later offered his own explanation when he was interviewed by the BBC's Jeremy Paxman on the Friday, which was; "I thought she was talking about expelling all university students from here who were foreigners". An excuse which was, if anything, even more bizarre, since it bore no relation whatsoever to any words that had ever come out of Mrs Duffy's mouth.

Back in the real world The Independent tried to put the best spin on it by describing it as "more a lapse than a catastrophe", and the best that the Daily Mirror could do was not to really mention it and rather focus on the fact that Brown had said sorry. Which he did. At least six times, according to some accounts. Or even seven, if one counted the rather the admission that "I don't get all of it right" during the course of the third televised leaders' debate on the Thursday evening. Elsewhere, however it was a "car crash for Gordon Brown" that had the "potential to inflict immense damage", as the Labour campaign had been plunged "into crisis", "thrown in turmoil" left "in disarray" etc etc. Or as one "cabinet source" succinctly put it, it was "a total, unmitigated disaster" that featured "absolutely no redeeming features". Even Brown himself appreciated that he had been "personally damaged" by the incident for which he was paying a "very high price".

---

Curiously enough those interested parties who read through the entire transcript of the conversation between Duffy and Brown would have been struck by the fact that the whole thing appeared fairly innocuous. Granted she asked some fairly blunt questions, such as "how are you going to get us out of all this debt Gordon?", not to mention her query regarding "all these eastern Europeans", but it all boiled down to a perfectly ordinary conversation with a perfectly ordinary voter of a kind that politicians should expect to have during the course of an election campaign. Quite why Brown thought it was a "disaster" wasn't clear, although perhaps it meant nothing more than Brown was so thin-skinned and paranoid that even the slightest hint of criticism was enough to disturb his calm.

Indeed when it came to analysing exactly where Brown had gone wrong, it was difficult to know where to begin. 'Everything' might have been the best place to start. He had certainly created the impression that there was a marked difference between his public persona and his private reality. Or as Mrs Duffy's niece was quoted as saying, "He has shown his true colours. He's always trying to pretend to be so nice and in touch with the people, but he's obviously not." But perhaps the real damage lay in the fact that Brown had described Mrs Duffy as "just a sort of bigoted woman that said she used to be Labour". So he wasn't simply expressing his contempt for Mrs Duffy herself, but rather for a whole group of voters to which he believed Mrs Duffy belonged; i.e. the white working-class with concerns about immigration. As one "cabinet source" put it, "These are the voters we needed to reach. These are the voters we need to turn out and support us and the Prime Minister insulted them." Or indeed to paraphrase the point that was made by a number of people; if that's what Brown thinks about lifelong Labour voters, you can just imagine the contempt that he holds the rest of us.

Of course, what difference what effect this would have on the actual election was uncertain, although many may well have agreed with The Sun's judgement that "Gordon Brown's election hopes seemed to be toast". The one thing that was reasonably certain was that it meant that any Labour defeat in the coming General Election would be laid at Brown's door. His enemies within the Party now had the perfect weapon to deploy against him, and any ideas he might have had about remaining as Labour Party leader were probably best put to one side.

There were rumours that The Sun was offering Mrs Duffy £50,000 for her story, but in end it was the Mail on Sunday that secured that "exclusive interview" which it ran under the headline 'Gordon won't be getting my vote' on the 2nd May 2010. It turned out that what upset Mrs Duffy most was the way that Brown had dismissed her as "that woman" and that she wasn't impressed by Brown's attempt at a personal apology which she saw as nothing more than a bout of "prolonged self-justification". At one stage, Brown even issued an invitation for her to "come to No10 and meet me and Sarah", at which point the only thought that crossed her mind was "I don't think you'll be there". She also informed the Mail, that having watched the leaders' debate held on the 29th April, she had concluded that she didn't think that "Gordon came across at all well" and was of the opinion that "David Cameron knows he's three-quarters of the way there". But perhaps the most notable moment came when Mrs Duffy delivered what might be construed as Gordon Brown's political epitaph; "The thing is, I'm the sort of person he was meant to look after, not shoot down."

---

SOURCES

• James Cook, Eyewitness: Brown's 'disastrous day' after bigot slur, BBC News, 28 April 2010
  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8650235.stm
• Murray Wardrop and Richard Edwards, Gordon Brown versus Gillian Duffy: transcript in full, Daily Telegraph, 28 Apr 2010
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7646088/General-Election-2010-Gordon-Brown-versus-Gillian-Duffy-transcript-in-full.html
• Nicholas Watt, Gordon Brown's election car crash provides Labour with its most dangerous moment of the campaign, The Guardian, 28 April 2010
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/wintour-and-watt/2010/apr/28/gordon-brown-election-car-crash
• Lance Price, Gordon Brown's gaffe is nothing short of a disaster, The Guardian, 28 April 2010
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/28/general-election-2010-gordon-brown
• Sam Coates, A highly damaging moment for Gordon Brown, The Times, April 28, 2010
  http://timesonline.typepad.com/election10/2010/04/a-highly-damaging-moment-for-gordon-brown.html
• John Prescott, Bigot 'gaffe' is nothing but a Murdoch plot, The Guardian, 28 April 2010
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/28/bigot-gaffe-murdoch-john-prescott
• Nicola Boden, Gordon goes back to grovel in person, Daily Mail, 28th April 2010
  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1269486/Election-2010-Gordon-Browns-bigoted-woman-insult-Gillian-Duffy.html
• Bob Roberts and Patrick Mulchrone, Gordon Brown in agony over ‘bigot’ election gaff, says wife Sarah, Daily Mirror, 29/04/2010
  http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/04/29/gordon-brown-in-agony-over-bigot-election-gaff-says-wife-sarah-115875-22219389/
• Roland Watson, Brown’s ‘bigot’ blunder plunges Labour campaign into crisis, The Times April 29, 2010
  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article7111086.ece
• Graeme Wilson, Richard Moriarty And Alex West, She’s not bigot... he’s not clever, The Sun, Published: 29 Apr 2010
  http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/election2010/2952263/Gordon-Brown-brands-gran-a-bigot.html
• Niall Firth, Revealed: 'Bigot' row pensioner REFUSED spin doctors' pleas, Daily Mail, 29th April 2010
  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1269698/Gordon-Brown-Gillian-Duffy-gaffe-Prime-Minister-draws-line-bigotgate-ahead-debate.html
• Laura Collins and Simon Walters, Gordon won't be getting my vote, Mail on Sunday, 2nd May 2010
  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1270337/Gordon-wont-getting-vote-Gillian-Duffy-reveals-REALLY-upset-devastating-exchange-PM.html

"I'm Harriet Harman, you know where you can get me" were the words allegedly spoken by one Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Chairman of the Labour Party, Lord Privy Seal, Leader of the House of Commons, and Minister for Women and Equality, during an incident which took place in Camberwell on the afternoon of the 3rd July 2009.

It came to pass that Ms Harman was driving her red Ford Fiesta at Bushey Hill Road near to where she had her home at Camberwell in South London, and was holding a conversation on her mobile phone when she struck a parked car. Naturally this incident attracted a small crowd of onlookers, including the owner of the struck vehicle, who then approached Ms Harman, at which point she wound down her window, made her pronouncement, and then drove off.

According to a "senior police source" they were later contacted by "concerned members of the public who had witnessed the accident and the behaviour of Ms Harman". Details were then passed to the London Traffic Unit, which proceeded to launch an investigation, since hitting a stationary vehicle would itself be a prima facie case of driving without due care and attention; leaving the scene of an accident without handing over your insurance or registration details would be an offence under the Road Traffic Act 1988, whilst using a mobile phone whilst driving would also an offence, normally punishable with an automatic three points and a £60 fine.

When the story first hit the press in early October 2009 it appeared that although the incident had taken place some three months previously, the London Traffic Unit had oddly enough yet to interview Ms Harman. There were rumours that they had attempted to do so, but that Ms Harman refused to speak to them, on the grounds that they were civilian support staff rather than actual police officers, despite the fact that it was her own government that was encouraging the use of civilian support staff in such circumstances in order to free up police officers for more important duties.

The press were particularly interested in the tale, not only because it involved a senior government minister, but also because the government minister in question had, as we say in Britain, 'previous'. In 2003 she was fined £400 and disqualified for a week after being convicted of driving at 99 mph on a motorway, and again in 2007 she received a £60 fixed-penalty notice and three penalty points after being caught driving at 50 mph in a 40 mph zone on the A14 in Suffolk. In the latter case, she narrowly avoided a further appearance at Ipswich Magistrates' Court due to her failure to pay the fine on time. A quite understandable lapse given that she was engaged in the contest for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party at the time.

As far as these latest allegations were concerned, Ms Harman produced a spokeswoman who announced that she "strongly refutes the allegations but is co-operating with the police". Students of the English language would immediately have noted that the word refute means to "disprove, overthrow by argument, prove to be false", and wondered why, if Ms Harman was capable of disproving the allegation, she had not simply handed this evidence over to the police, and avoided the public expense of a trial. However as the Oxford English Dictionary notes, refute is "Sometimes used erroneously to mean 'deny, repudiate'" which is presumably what Ms Harman really meant to say.

Nevertheless a case file was duly sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, and the CPS duly decided to charge Ms Harman with driving without due care and attention and driving while using a mobile phone. She was not however charged with 'leaving the scene of an accident' presumably because she had sufficiently identified herself by shouting "I'm Harriet Harman, you know where you can get me" before driving off. Stranger still however was the fact that the charge of driving while using a mobile phone was withdrawn when the matter came before Westminster Magistrates' Court on the 8th January 2010. This appeared to be a particularly perverse decision given that Prosecutor Michael Jennings informed the court that Ms Harman was "using her mobile phone when she got into the car and throughout the low-speed incident". To cap it all the nation discovered what Ms Harman really meant by "refutes" as she pled guilty to the charge of driving without due care and attention.

She was fined £350, ordered to pay £75 costs together with a £15 victim surcharge, and had three points added to her driving licence. Naturally some people were rather upset at this display of leniency.. A certain Cathy Keeler, from a road safety campaign group known as Brake, was particularly incensed at the at the failure to charge Harman with the use of a mobile phone whilst driving, and declared that it was "unacceptable" for "someone who is so much in the public eye to disregard laws that are there for the safety of the public". Cynics noted that had Ms Harman also been charged with the mobile phone offence, the additional three points would have taken her total up to twelve and resulted in an automatic driving ban. A state of affairs that would have no doubt caused her some inconvenience, there being an election expected in the near future. Perhaps the CPS knew what it was doing after all.

SOURCES

• James Millbank, 'I'm Harriet Harman - you know where you can get me...', Daily Mail, 04th October 2009
  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1217974/Im-Harriet-Harman--know--What-Minister-allegedly-told-witness-crashing-parked-car.html
• Harriet Harman fined £350 for careless driving, BBC News, 8 January 2010
  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8447784.stm

Well folks, the title really tells you everything you need to know here. But I'm gonna go ahead and tell you a little story anyway.

A few days ago, I decided to organise all my Facebook friends into lists, by how and from where I know them. I was secretly getting a bit worried that most of my "friends" were really work colleagues and that I'm turning into one of those corporate types and will eventually replace my profile picture with my cat in an Intel t-shirt or something. So I broke it up into family, work, friends from back home, people I know from when I lived in Dublin, people from the old alt.fan.pratchett community, misc, and noders. And you know what? After my old school friends, the noder list turned out to be the longest.

And then I sort of went down the list and started remembering all kinds of fun stories I know about these people, all sorts of adventures we shared... Like the time I went to a residential gaming convention in deepest darkest Irish countryside because some bloke on the internet was all "you should come, it'll be fun". Or the time in 2003 when we had this crazy hot summer and dope was reclassified as "you won't get arrested" and we had that meet in Hyde Park that I honestly can't remember any of because some people took the reclassification pretty seriously...

Then there was that crazy bunch of noders clambering all over the Wiltshire countryside and getting bogged down in huge quagmires and having to jump fences and that's how we know certain noders definitely wear pants with pink bats on them... And then once somebody flew in to a meet just for the weekend and I had eleven noders sleeping like pilchards in a can, all in a row on my front room carpet. Oh yeah, and do you remember when there was this handfasting on Hampstead Heath, and I carted a wedding cake all the way from Swindon, and then we did readings in Hebrew? Plus there was my birthday, when we set up a production line of Goth make up in the Camden Tup, which has closed since but I hope we had nothing to do with that.

But then the stories begin to resolve. And they're not stories about crowds anymore, but about people: Katie and I looking for a coffee shop in Soho at midnight because the pubs have closed and we still had so much to talk about. Meeting Daniela's grandmother, who is awesome. David giving me the most amazing line drawing of me he did from a photo. Graeme saying thank you for things that are a bit personal so I won't go in to them, but hey man - you're totally welcome. Christine driving for an hour to pick me up from Sacramento and then cooking me poached eggs for breakfast. Haje catching the train from London to keep me company for an evening because I was lonely. Catherine telling me jokes all the way on the ferry back from Calais so I don't get seasick. These aren't just noders, they're not just screen names - they're friends. And I'm sorry to all the friends I might have left out, people I love dearly and some of whom are still very much in my life and some of whom are a bit gone, but hey, that's life. Just believe me when I say I remember you all, and if I wasn't afraid I'd run out of space, I'd tell all the stories.

So, E2 is going to be ten years old in a few weeks. And you know what? Normally I'm not a sentimental gal. And I've tended to cock an eyebrow at people who say they love E2 "because of the community". I don't know how much of a community we are, online. But offline? We are so totally a community now. And that's why I want to step up and help celebrate E2's birthday in a real life kind of manner.

What I'd like to do is go back to every place we've ever had a good time together and do it all again. Such is the way of nostalgia. But that would be, how shall we say, maybe not the most practical. So instead, DEB and I are inviting you to come and have a pint with us in some of the more memorable, traditional, convenient or simply good London pubs that we've had nodermeets in over the years. All credit for devising the route, working out timings, remembering the names of the pubs and deciding where we should eat - in other words, for the real work - goes to her lovely self. Below is the intinerary we propose, approximately divided into time slots so that if you can't join us at the beginning, you could still catch up with us later, on

Saturday, November 14th 2009

• 11:00 Meet at The Freemason's Arms, Hampstead.
• 12:00 Fitzroy Tavern, Charlotte Street
• 13:00 Bricklayer's Arms, Gresse Street - lunch
• 14:30 The George, Wardour Street
• 15:30 If weather permits, and we're not running short on time or light, a stroll up to and through Hyde Park
• 16:45 Penderel's Oak, High Holborn
• 17:45 The Knight's Templar, Chancery Lane
• 19:00 The Plume of Feathers, Park Vista, Greenwich - dinner, and a nice quiet rest after all the rushing around.

I think after all the work DEB's put in to this, I'd better turn up even of nobody else does. But hey, it'll be way more fun to have y'all along for company. You should come. It'll be fun.

So far, we've got:

Nostalgic Noders:

• Me
• The Debutante
• BaronWR
• spiregrain
• fondue
• sam512
• Wntrmute
• TenMinJoe
• DTal
• ...

Indecisive Independents:

• Albert Herring
• Oolong
• Hazelnut
• ...

Antisocial Abstainers:

• Junkill
• lpm
• Nadine2

In the UK, summer is upon us and the weather gods are indicating that it is going to a pleasant one. A great reason to trot out the Pimm's, cucumber sandwiches, lie about on picnic rugs and turn a blind eye to the bare white beer bellies, all in the company of delightful noders.

It has been five years since the last London Park Nodermeet and seven since the first. Considering both of these nodermeets has resulted in noder marriages, it is time to test a theory, all scientific like. The theory is that a park, with sunshine and noders may cause love.

According to one of Britnoder's huge mathematical brains, wntrmute, we have a good chance of success. "With the small sample space of a pair of nodermeets, and noder romance being infinitely more mysterious than celestial mechanics, I'm thus happy to apply the rule of succession and declare the probability of a third marriage to be 3/4."

This all in the name of science, honest, guv.

When? Saturday 25th July 2009, from 1pm until the sun goes down.

Where? Regent's Park. Just in from the Chester Gate on the outer circle. Close to the Regents Park tube station. Map of the park can be found here, lower right corner is our destination. Message me for my phone number if you intend to get a little lost. I am aiming to have some sort of flag flying so the group is locatable. See below for the Plan B.

Weather: We are hoping for good weather. Plan B is to decamp to the Yorkshire Grey, not far from the park, a Sam Smiths pub that does food. A table will be booked and announcement about the change placed here.

Why?: Well, to prove a theory and for me to celebrate five years since landing in Blighty.

What(to bring): Food, drink, rugs, picnic hampers, Frisbee, cricket bats, umbrella and sun screen. Sharing ones bounty will be encouraged. (Gin soaked may just need some testers for their picnic food.)

Who: Noders, friends of noders, lovers of noders, new noders, old noders in short if you have read this, come along.

Update!! At the moment the weather is changeable. If you are going, message me and I will give you my number, then text me and I will text you on the day if we are going to the pub. At the moment the plan is to Picnic!

Those who are daring to test the theory.

La petite mort – Successful in previous trial.
StrawberryFrog - Successful in previous trial.
The Debutante - Laboratory assistant.
sam512 - computing the algorithms.
spiregrain - charming the agar.
BaronWR - wrangling the bacteria.
Nadine_2 - annoying the test animals.
fondue - putting the results into binary.
Wntrmute - calculating the equations.
Andrew Aguecheek - polishing the test tubes.
krimson - squinting at the geometry.
DTal - tweaking the numerals.

The control group

Hazelnut - lab rat
BaronessWR - white mouse

Those who can not stand the science.

tentative - sabbatical
wertperch - secondment
dimview - leave of absence
junkill - retreat

Crash space for out of towners can be arranged.

Nadine_2 is in need of some floor for his body to rest upon. Offers to him or me.
sam512 is also in need of crash space. Offers to him or me.