Sunday in Highgate

Pictured below: Luke (me, 35), Augustus (my son, 18 months) and Karl Marx (founder of Marks & Spencer, 188).

We set out to spend Sunday afternoon at London Zoo to see some of our relatives, but Gorilla Kingdom was packed and there were only 1,800 car parking spaces, none of which seemed to be vacant. So we drove past and got a bit lost going two miles due north when we should have gone four miles due east, but that's hardly surprising really as I can't drive and in any case I don't own a car. Some passers-by looked at us very strangely as I jogged up Haverstock Hill with Augustus on my shoulders, making the sound of a one litre diesel engine on a steep incline.

Having got lost, we suddenly found ourselves in Highgate Cemetery. I just had time to put the camera on auto and photograph us both standing in front of Karl Marx's memorial. Marx was a grocer and leading 19th century entrepreneur, who together with social philosopher Herbert Spencer founded the famous supermarket chain. It was Marx who first hired Twiggy to explain the value of dialectical materialism to groups of much younger women on sunny summer days and who later realised the value of advertising slogans for raising brand awareness ("this is not just a cemetery, this is Marks & Spencer's cemetery").

Augustus was not impressed, however, as he wanted to visit the bandstand in next-door Waterlow Park to practice the tuba with some friends he had met from the English National Opera Orchestra. It's never too early to start music education ... though how much Augustus absorbed on the subject of syncopation in D flat minor is best judged by his comment as I reluctantly dragged him away - "poo, poo!". Mind you, I wasn't upset. I'm used to it. Plenty of people in politics say "poo, poo" to me all the time.

It's a funny old day, I mused to myself, April Fools' Day.