For an average Brit, I'm quite unusual, I've got three names you see. There's my real name, which stays in the shadows for blogging purposes, then there's my blogging handle itself - Archimedes, and on the heels of those two there's my Native American name. Yeah, I've got one of those too. A special one, just for me, apparently it reflects my spirit, my inner self. So up there with Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, and Dancing Bear is... Wild Goose Chase... or me.

Very apt. I do get all too easily distracted, get an enthusiasm stuck between my teeth and that's it, I'm away. Straight in, up to my neck, chasing an idea, a fragment that's all it takes, the faintest scent, even the spoor will do. There's one now, chafing, waiting to be scratched. It's about Shepherds Bush. Find a scruffier part of West London than here if you can, (it's difficult, believe me); right now though, it's got it's charmingly bedraggled fingers around my shoulders with absolutely no sign of letting go either.

One of my yoga classmates and I were mulling over Shepherds Bush, what makes it what it is, whats it's character. For her it's as cheerless and dilapidated as they come, overwhelmingly dodgy; people lurk, they skulk in and out of strange looking shops which never seem to have anything to sell. Above all there's an odd, dispiriting aura about it, something she finds intensely disquieting.

Me, well, I'm of the view that Shepherds Bush has a mad sense of being down at hill and yet rakish at the same time; it's a madcap example of endless kinetic motion, there's always something happening, good, bad, neutral, whatever, there's something going on. And I like that energy

I imagine there's a number of reasons why she finds it the way she does, no doubt a mixture of minor and major key factors I suppose, that's how it seems to work for most people. However, there was one thing she mentioned that I have to follow up: she wonders whether the reason she finds so dank and cold-hearted is that Shepherds Bush Green is on the site of an old plague pit...

Anyone who knows me realises that I'm never happier than when there's a tangential scrap of information blown into my face, wrapped around so tight I can't see anything but a tantalising tidbit that is crying out to be followed up on. I love these moments. This is hog heaven.

After I've posted this entry, it'll be a big deep breath then a swan dive straight into a search engine. Wild Goose Chase simply has to find out if 300 years ago plague victims were carted out of the City of London through what would have been countryside and then interred into a pit in Shepherds Bush.