The attraction of drain covers isn’t evident to most people. We walk over them without noticing. Primary schools sometimes do rubbings of them with crayons, like an urban industrial version of brass rubbings, but most people don’t give them a second glance or thought.

After having my flu jab this morning I was wandering along The Grove and spotted a couple of Drain covers with designs that were positively fractal, quite exciting as drain covers go. The patterns were quite vertiginous in a way that would pass muster in the opening credits for Dr Who. Most of the others were dull, symmetrical and functional. Nothing to see here. But these ones were an artistic labour of love that were worth giving a bit of respect to. Perhaps even photographing and collecting. Jeremy Corbyn is on to something here it seems.

One of the less serious attempts to put people off voting for Jeremy was the story that he collected photos of drain covers. This was part of a wider campaign to present him as a cracked eccentric; because it must be completely inappropriate to have a leader of a mass political party who grows his own cucumbers and pots his own jam. This, nevertheless, shows how universal this attack was. No stone left unturned. No angle not covered.

On Saturday, the rather secretive Roe Green Walled Garden was opened for a day. It does this a couple of times a year. Even though I’ve lived here for over 25 years, I’ve never been in there before, and it’s quite an extraordinary place. A sort of collective allotment growing organic produce, cultivating compost and worm juice (not for human consumption) and a celebration of a certain kind of suburban eccentricity and local historical awareness, with a little occasional cafe and a couple of sheds with a collection of fascinating bric a brac and second hand books. A joy of a place. Scattered around are life size dummies, mostly of people who lived on the site from the 1901 census with information about who they were. The Lodge by Kingsbury Road, which was empty for years and we used to call the “rat house”, because that’s who lived there, and is now on its third attempt to be rebuilt as a restaurant, was where a gardner lived with his family; and his model sits outside one of the shed with his mouldy cap on and a brass dog at his knee. But, my favourite is the bloke who donated the bike he cycled to Paris on in 1937. Tempting to follow suit, but I’d need an electric bike to manage it these days. He also looks a bit like Jeremy Corbyn.