Summer's here at last and London lives outdoors again..tattooed and talented

Elena's Mum enjoying her day out in the sun on the way to the Russian Orthodox Church nr Hyde Park

The sunlight streaked across the streets, instantly transforming every building, plant, tree, flower and face. Once there were frowns, now there were smiles. The leaves on the trees waved back at heaven saying thanks be to thee, to thee, and we felt ourselves just carried along on the running tide heading down to Hyde Park.

There, people were peopling, canoodling, cuddling and playing. Families were happy families, lonely people felt as if they belonged after all and children saw how young their parents were and how even younger were their grandparents.

It was impossible not to feel like the luckiest people in the luckiest place on earth, this demi-paradise, this sceptered city, this London of all the peoples.

And it was sad to think that in that other great city, Cairo, they are shaping up for a fight, unable to find a peaceful way of solving the endless argument : the ways of God or the ways of men. God seems to have left economics alone, but his spokesmen on earth have a plan anyway. It doesn't seem to be working, though, for the men that have to make it work, and they want to be listened to. We hope that skulls won't be cracked and that peace prevails. Come on God, intervene, don't just sit there!

The Russian Orthodox Church in Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge.

And then came Kamila.

Kamila Pavlova has a head turning tattoo on her back which tempted us to ask her about it, but we ended up discussing her business plan for her new career.

Kamila is a surgeon, from the Czech Republic, and she has been working in the great hospitals of London : Guys, St Thomas's and Bart's, putting ordinary mortals back together again with plastic surgery.

We bowed down with deep respect.

But alas, the labyrinthine structure of the NHS, its tortoise promotion scheme, it's Ariadne's thread that must be pulled through to get a promotion, has left Kamila frustrated and she will leave to go into private practise soon.

Check her out (no pun intended) as she is as charming as she is skilled and clever, and she will make you whole again, using all the arts of the plastic surgeon.

Hyde Park London, The Rolling Stones, Margaret Thatcher, Sarin and don't trust any Government

London has sun and shadow bouncing around the buildings and jumping around the pavements, parks and greens. It’s as if the day is nervous, it can’t stand still as the slight breeze makes the leaves throw lace patterns around that dance and jig in their excitement - a sunny day, at last!

We decide that Hyde Park is the place to be, a great green carpet in the heart of London, an everyman space, provided and maintained by the ratepayers and taxpayers of London for everyone, rich, middling, poor or destitute, you are free to wander here. It is a superb symbol of the municipal spirit, the idea that there are some things which can’t be bought but can be paid for out of the common treasury.

The earth shall be a common treasury!

So said The Levellers and Gerard Winstanley in the 17th Century of Oliver Cromwell’s England.

His utopian experiment in Christian communism was broken up by Cromwell’s troops, but he will be smiling today as he peers down on the public parks of Britain, feeling that here, at least, is one legacy, unacknowledged, that he can claim a part in.

But stop!

The Rolling Stones, ancient and aging troubadours of the 1960’s, are going to hold a concert here in the park and will charge over £100 a ticket!

The Stones remind us of the African religion that holds that there are some spirits which can kill people but the victims do not realise that they are dead, so they wander around, dazed and confused, often making fools of themselves.

These spirits must have chosen the Stones as victims some time ago, for they are surely perfect examples of the living dead - ‘ the graves did open and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the streets’ to paraphrase the bard.

In 1969, they played in Hyde Park for free.

What happened, apart from the fact that in the interval they have earned a large fortune from record sales and broadcast fees, to drive a wedge into the principle that the park is free for everyone?

Was it Margaret Thatcher and the enterprise spirit which she unleashed?

If there is no such thing as society, why should there be public parks?

We don’t know, but when it comes to politicians, democracy and distrust are the only safeguards we all of us have.

My parents look back on 1953, the year I was born, as a time of decency and order, the year that things got going again after the war.

But in that year, the Conservative Government invited British servicemen to take part in research into a cure for the common cold.

They were lying - it was the nerve gas sarin that they were researching.

One Ronald Maddison died a horrific death from its affect.

This was, of course, suppressed with all the secret power of the British state, and my parents, along with the rest of the country, were able to hang on to their patriotic illusions.

A report in  Daily Telegraph about Porton Down, theGovernment research centre into nerve gas, reveals that this old trick ofdeceiving our servicemen into helping out with research into the effects ofsarin gas was still being played, and suppressed, in 1983, under Margaret Thatcher’sgovernment.

She may have changed some things for the better, but some of the big bad things seem to have just carried on calmly, as the old war poster advised.

And carry on calmly they did, from the auspicious year of 1953. One man who could have claimed to have been a genius and to have saved his country was Alan Turing, the mathematician. (He cracked the enigma code the Nazi military used during WW2)

But he was a homosexual, so in 1953, when homosexuality was illegal, the authorities hounded him to his death by insisting that he take a course of injections to change his sexuality. These caused him to commit suicide.

If this is what they will do to a national hero, none of us is safe.

Especially since, as we've seen, some things don’t change, but others are now charged for and youth grows spectre thin and rolling stones do gather moss.........

The secret courts are on their way, so tread warily on your way.