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If you walk along Piccadilly towards Hyde Park, or Buckingham Palace, or Hard Rock Cafe, you will pass the Cavalry & Guards Club. If you've walked along towards Hyde Park Corner many of the buildings and passageways hold secret treasures which I am about to reveal to you. Let's start with the entrance to the Cavalry and Guards' club. Walking back in the other direction but on the same side of the road it is just along from Hyde Park Corner from the underground station, beyond hard Rock Cafe. In the hallway of the Cavalry & Guards club is a patriotic painting showing her Majesty the Queen in a park beside the lake and pink flamingoes. What is special about the painting and the painter.
The Mysterious Mouse - Can you find it?
The portrait was painted by a painter famous for including a mouse in all his paintings. Where is the mouse?
I can tell you. Lower right hand corner. The man on the security desk told us. Even after he had told us, three out of four of us could not see it.
I was visiting the club for the second time. Each time I discover something new. On my second visit I did not merely discover the mouse. As I descended the staircase from the private dining room on the second floor, on the staircase I found a flag, a German flag. Why?
The plaque said it was captured in WWI from the Germans at Ypres - by a man who won an award. It seems very sad, now that we and the Germans are friends again, that years ago a young man had to risk his life capturing a strip of land and a strip of cloth.
However, I also passed a grand piano. Downstairs, looking for the mouse in the painting was a distraction. It cheered me up. I left the building smiling.
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