Green Pea 1st Sunday Expedition

Last Sunday Green Pea took it's very first field trip. Thanks to a red hot tip off from secret agent aka Lucy (ex military-wing, Bohemia, codename Kingdom of 'O') we knew of a possible dream 'community building' building, located tantalisingly close to our lovely MP's local surgery headquarters, Southgate Town Hall which is, bizarrely, 2 miles from Southgate in Palmers Green. No idea why as of yet though.

So, Sinead, Jordan, Eran & Lucy took a trip, dedicatedly in the bucketing rain to see this fabled house, called 'Truro', for ourselves. On arrival we were greeted with a giant, elegant and suitably ramshackle country villa, built alongside the local canal.

It looked vacant. Could this be our new community centre, just waiting for us to liberate it?? We cased the joint, strolling along the delightful canal in the drizzle, stopping only to commit random canoodle, in time honoured fashion at the kissing gate, oblivious in our love for one another to the misery of the weather.

And, to our great excitement, when we peered over the slanted wire fence, and over the overgrown garden, as we wondered whether the security alarms were working or the satellite dish functioning, lo and behold! we spied a distant shadowy figure in the romantic mist, standing by what looked like a plume of smoke coming out of a barrel. Someone was having a fire in the rain! I waved at the figure and gestured somehow (I forget exactly how) as if to say 'can we come in?'

To our enormous and palapable joy, he waved back, signalling for us to come round to the other side, near where we had originally parked the car. Great! I thought, this is it ~ it could only mean one thing, couldn't it? Squatters!

Excitedly, thinking this was our big break ~ we would easily now make friends with these lovely people, and then of course the rest would be history ~ I urged the others to run with me around the building, we were like puppies slipping and sliding with brollies akimbo, rushing to meet our new soon-to-be-best-friends.

Turned out of course that the individuals were, bizarrely, a somewhat well-dressed group of Romanians, paid to live in and look after the property to protect it from, you guessed it, squatters! They worked for some corporate big-wig, waiting for planning permission to do it and carve it up into yuppie flats.

They were having a barbeque for their friends, who arrived just as we were being turned away. In the rain. No room at the inn..

Oh well, keep looking Lucy Lu, & we will find the perfect space in the end. or die laughing trying!