Unexpected trip to London

As I recorded yesterday, instead of journeying to Dorking to work in my office there today, I drove to our Salisbury office this morning to leave my car there and take the train up to London to appear on my Company's behalf in the Royal Courts of Justice on a Directions Hearing before the Master in respect of a disputed health claim case. My assistant Belinda was due to attend but as the other side were using a barrister it was felt prudent to ask me to attend. I met up with Hilary, from our Claims Dept. in the office and we walked up to the station to catch the 9.20 a.m. train. I would have caught it at Grateley except that I discovered yesterday evening that if I had gone to Grateley to join it as originally intended, I would simply have watched it flash through that station at 70 mph! It was the fast express! The weather was fine when we arrived in London and we walked over Waterloo Bridge to the Courts. Having divested ourselves of metal and other objects and gone through the high security screening, we consulted the Daily Cause List to discover that our case wasn't actually listed. We made our way to the East Block and found that the Master to whom the case had been allocated was simply the Practice Master (PM) for the Day i.e. available for emergency and ad hoc applications only. I found the barrister on the other side in the Bear Garden (yes it is spelt as the animal not the drink!) on the phone trying to reach my assistant. Apparently the court was supposed to have written to the parties to tell us that the hearing had been postponed until Friday! However, as Master Foster was available as the PM he would hear our case (he didn't seem to have anything else to do at that moment). Thankfully, the barrister on the other side was most reasonable and we came away with a consensual order we could both live with. Having dealt with the matter so quickly I had a little time to spare in London, so used my otherwise lunch hour to visit Stop the Traffik near Waterloo Station and met with two of their staff over a mug of tea in one of their meeting rooms. Ruth would have joined us too but was still away in New York. It proved to be a most fruitful meeting. Back on the train to Salisbury and back to the office where I dealt with a number of emails which had piled up during the day as well as some emergency work from the Isle of Man. I managed to get to the gym this evening, with a full kit, for an hour before getting back home and being plunged into trying to help Sara help Tom with some linear equations - me who had to resit maths GCE!!? I have never found the need, personally, to know in my daily life what the value of x is in an equation such as 6(2x-2) = 5(1-x). Please don't even try to work it out unless you are sad! I had a bath to sooth my aching limbs (and brain?) - all that walking in London and on the gym treadmill - and then spent the evening doing my preparation for the House Group on Thursday. Tomorrow it is Dorking!