The Personal Touch

The above pen and ink sketch is of Harlech Castle. I have used it for the basis of a couple of paintings.
This afternoon I was teaching. The pupil chooses her own subject and today the subject was London.
She did a very nice modern take of the Palace of Westminster in the rain at night.

 I was asked if I had worked in London. Good question. Well I have been to London and worked there for a couple of days at a time but never lived there fortunately. The thing I found about the Metropolitan Police was you needed the personal touch. If you rang a CID office and asked them to do a job for you they were, too busy (according to them) or even if you got someone to agree to do a job for you you could never locate them again, they had either left, been transferred, been suspended you name it they had an excuse for it.
If you went there it was totally different they couldn't do enough for you. You would go into a CID Office and be introduced as the boys from the sticks. Hospitality then no problem. A drawer would open a bottle of whiskey would appear they would talk about everything and even the job in hand if you were lucky. Then the whole office would accompany you to the nearest "Boozer". The following day in a haze  you would be transported to arrest or interview the subject of your enquiry. Its probably all different now. DCI Gene Hunt has retired and a 12 year old manager fresh from doing his Phd in business studies is now allocating intelligence (read computer)  related tasks to career desk jockeys. I'm probably being very unfair and looking back the 80's were certainly not perfect but police officers lived and breathed the job.
Anyway so what was the subject today? The Place of Westminster and Big Ben well actually no because Big Ben is the name for the bell in the clock tower not the clock itself.