Python in St James Park

April 2004

23 April 2004 was a warm and sunny day in London. On emerging from a meeting into the sunshine at about 3pm I walked across St James Park which was, as you’d expect, jam-packed with people doing all sorts of things from feeding the ducks to practising their poi balls, though perhaps none more remarkable than the man who’d decided to take his python for a walk. In fact he’d been intercepted by the police and was being watched over by a silent policeman in a flak jacket while he, the man with the python, sat on a low fence looking sullen. The python wasn’t looking like it had any emotion as pythons don’t, except rather fat so whether it had just eaten one of the ducks I can only speculate. The policeman in the flak jacket, who had some support from two more of his profession standing back rather, looked a little worried while trying to stay in charge. I’d have liked to have hung around to see the outcome and possibly found out how the man had got the python there in the first place, whether he’d brought it on the bus or the tube for example, but as ever when I’m in London these days, I had another meeting to go to. It was quite a sizeable python.