the advantages of a late flight (and symmetry)

I've never taken such a late flight back from LHR: 3.45 p.m., supposedly - it actually left at 4.55 ... Advantage 1 was that it was much cheaper than earlier ones; Advantage 2 - it was the only international flight arriving at 8 p.m., and that meant the passport control and luggage claim were, for once, amazingly speedy.  But as well, there was time to go for a walk on Wimbledon Common and into Cannizaro Park this morning - here's the pond in Cannizaro;

the glade where I took my first steps -

and the back view of the hotel.  I'd love to say that I owe my enthusiasm for dandelions to Cannizaro, but I suspect it's more venal: my parents used to pay me a penny per hundred dandelion heads (weeding, apart from the time Ray made dandelion wine, which exploded on our cellar steps at Naworth).

But the real symmetry lies in the fact that 20 Hillside wasn't finished when we moved back to Wimbledon in January 1961, so we went to live for five months in a Residential Hotel, the Southdown Hall (demolished in the late 60s, I would think).  I don't know who stayed there in the 1930s - image below - but in 1961 I was the youngest person there by thirty years, and ten there was probably another 25 year gap between my parents and the yuongest of the rest of the residents.  They were mostly - or so it seemed - retired administrators and military from British India, sitting reading The Times in the dining room (I can't remember much about the food, other than poached haddock, and bread and butter pudding, in which the currants were inevitably burnt.  I guess it was, also, cheap.  It seems right, somehow, that my time at 20 Hillside should be bookended by stays in Wimbledon hotels ...