Conundrums

1: Why do ducks sleep on one leg?

To have one still functioning if anything happens to the one they're standing on?

2. Why am I always taken by surprise when the Christmas shopping season starts?

This was the queue for Santa's first day at Canary Wharf this morning.

So far, so enlivening. But in the afternoon, I went up to town, planning to visit the reopened Transport Museum, and with a couple of mundane items to buy.

So why was I surprised to find as long a queue waiting to get into the museum? Why was I surprised not to find around Covent Garden a place selling simple clip frames (because there's nowhere within half an hour's travel to buy a bit of glass to replace something broken - much easier to buy a whole new frame that's come all the way from China: this is called progress) and a bit of Blu-tak?

And why is it that walking through all those crowds turns me into an exhausted combination of Scrooge and Eeyore?

And why does a cup of tea make all the difference?