PICTURE this: you are a tourist in the middle of Mayfair, perhaps staying in the Sheraton Park Lane or The Ritz if you are lucky. You cross the road from Green Park via Buckingham Palace and you come across an individual who looks like a gentlemanly type of fellow sitting in an upholstered chair in the middle of a back street just off Piccadilly. Then you spy a policeman strolling over to the said gent. You’d be forgiven for thinking the sitting figure would be marched off in handcuffs but no. Instead, you hear the policeman query: “Are you OK, Sir?” And – do we imagine it? – “Would Sir like a cup of tea?”
This isn’t some scene from a particularly English, Richard Curtis-style movie, though it could be, but a “truly comical” episode in the Kennel Club’s recent history, which is being relayed by the Club’s library and collections manager, Ciara Farrell, in the basement of a smart building in Clarges Street, where the Kennel Club is located. She’s describing the time in 2016 when the Club hadits former home to where it is situated now. Only it wasn’t as easy as it sounds, “because of the one-way system here. You have to go round and round in a nightmare journey. So one of our dear members sat himself in an armchair in the middle of the street to hold the parking space.”