Sunday, April 28/2019

Tube back from Kilburn via Oxford Circus as Circle and District on weekend upgrading. It’s also the day of the London Marathon, a nice cool day for the runners, and opposite us in the carriage is a man about our age wearing the Marathon tag on a shoe and the lanyard round his neck. He looks tired but has every good reason to, and we give him thumbs up on the way out. On the Central line platform J looks across at a grimy metal ledge high  on the far side of the tracks and wonders how some orange peel and food scraps can possibly have ended up there. Then, more unlikely one would have thought, we spot a very small mouse active amongst the leavings. Twenty-six metres underground in a structure entirely of metal and concrete held together with generations of black grease.