{"id":907,"date":"2008-05-14T23:44:56","date_gmt":"2008-05-14T22:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dickonedwards.co.uk\/diary\/?p=907"},"modified":"2008-05-14T23:49:35","modified_gmt":"2008-05-14T22:49:35","slug":"being-of-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/archive\/being-of-use\/","title":{"rendered":"Being Of Use"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two bouts of usefulness today.<\/p>\n<p>First is a paid stint as a clue-giver in a Treasure Hunt. Sarah H has hired me to stand on the bridge in St James&#8217;s Park as &#8216;a suited man&#8217;, for about an hour. Various teams find me, I give them the clue to the next bit of the hunt, and they move on. It&#8217;s work even I can do okay, it&#8217;s fair to say. Particularly the being distinctive in a suit bit.<\/p>\n<p>One small boy passing me checks to see if I am a living statue.<\/p>\n<p>Second usefulness is on the way home, waiting at Tottenham Court Road tube. I am sitting on the bench closest to one end of the platform, when a couple of tube mice begin scampering around close by. I rather like the sight of mice scampering around the floor, dirt-covered or not, but the lady sitting next to me on the bench has a rather different attitude. She suddenly grabs my arm and shouts, &#8216;Oh my god! Oh god!&#8217; Clearly not a mouse person.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;It&#8217;s okay, they won&#8217;t come near, but I&#8217;ll shoo them out of sight,&#8217; I offer. Which isn&#8217;t exactly a Herculean task. It only takes a sudden movement in the mice&#8217;s direction to clear them off the platform and into the tunnel. But the women is effusive in her gratitude, with audible relief in her voice, and for once I feel almost manly.<\/p>\n<p>Just as well there are no Tube Snakes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two bouts of usefulness today. First is a paid stint as a clue-giver in a Treasure Hunt. Sarah H has hired me to stand on the bridge in St James&#8217;s Park as &#8216;a suited man&#8217;, for about an hour. Various teams find me, I give them the clue to the next bit of the hunt, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}