Public service

In the margins of a visit to Hampton Court Palace yesterday, to be reported on in due course, I thought to read the short history of the place offered by our fat book about London, of references 1 and 2.

The Palace gets a little over two pages, but as luck would have it, the next but one entry was for the Hand and Shears, a public house in which I served for a period as a second year undergraduate. An establishment where the landlord, a Czech who came over (via the Foreign Legion) during the second war and who knew his Švejk even better than I did, the wife made excellent ham sandwiches and trade was drawn from the meat market, then alive and well, and St. Bartholomew's Hospital, still alive and well. Director's bitter from Courage, excellent. A good beer, but one which needed to be looked after. An establishment which had gone downhill some way by the time I happened to visit in the margins of a course about the Data Protection Act or something of that sort, probably during the early 1990's.

Intrigued by the Court of Piepowder, on which the Encyclopædia had no more, and I had to ask Wikipedia, at reference 3. Piepowder seemingly being a French flavoured allusion to the dirty feet of the travelling people who frequented fairs.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=weinreb.

Reference 2: The London Encyclopædia - Weinreb & Hibbert - 1983.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_of_piepowders.

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