Trainspotting

Up bright and early last week to catch a very rare passage of a diesel locomotive with attendant passengers, through Epsom Station, heading towards London. A small and not very clean diesel, not at all like the class 45's which used to pull me to London from Cambridge and the carriages were not Pullmans, despite including a restaurant car which appeared to be serving breakfast. I completely failed to find out what it was doing there.

Onto our train, which for the two of us cost around £40. Quite a shock after years of buying off-peak Travelcards with senior railcard discount. Our carriage was reasonably full, and about half the inhabitants spent the whole journey working their mobile phones - mostly silently to be fair to them. A good proportion of the remainder were working their laptops. Some were doing both. Leaving only a small proportion to doze peacefully or gaze vaguely out of the window, the dominant and reasonably restful & relaxing occupation of my day. No real newspapers to be seen.

Strolled though interesting back ways to get us to Christchurch, Southwark, near the northern end of Blackfriars Road. Maybe the third church on the site with the parish being created in 1682 in the manor of Paris Garden, once famous for bear baiting as well as theatres and with bear baiting getting at least two mentions in the work of the Southwark Bard. A rather odd, brick built church, probably handsome when new in 1950 or so, but now looking rather shabby and probably not much used. Hard to see where they would get a congregation from. Many of the decorative features were derived from the trades which used to thrive in the area before the arrival of financial, legal and other white collar services.

From there, we reached the Tate Modern in time for the public launch of their Picasso Exhibition at 1000, along with perhaps 100 others. The doors, or rather the roller shutters, did indeed open a few seconds after St. Pauls had rung in the new hour.

The opening was busy, but not seriously crowded. A noticeable number of middle aged French speakers. Slightly more women than men. Some babies. And several large school parties, with the one from Stratford (East) including a large contingent of Muslim girls, perhaps in their early teens, all wearing their uniform blue headscarves. Presumably their mullah was of sufficiently liberal views for it to be OK for them to be viewing arty pornography in public. Which we found rather amusing.

The exhibition was held in maybe six or seven rooms, with most of them given over to two months of 1932, with the basic idea that one worked through that year. There was plenty of slapdash work but also plenty of interesting work on show and one had to admire the energy and creativity of the man - but the impression that I took away was that I was not that keen on his work. I was interested the way that he carefully dated and signed a sequence of very rough beach sketches, perhaps with an eye to their sale given that he had already made a good deal of money by 1932 and was able to live in some style. I wondered about points of contact with Simenon, rich in the same way, moving in overlapping arty circles and just twenty years younger, but checking later I could not find any sign of contact.

In our little booklet, we were given some words from Freud's one-time colleague Jung, uttered after he had visited an important retrospective in Zurich, words to the effect that Picasso was exhibiting his psychic problem on canvas for much the same reasons (but in a very effective way), as his patients would exhibit theirs in their words and in their behaviour. He is not articulating some timeless truth about the world, rather some transient inner wrinkle. A bit of the pink noise of reference 7. Thus giving birth to the world of expressionism...

While from the slapdash, I associated to our own Hirst, who apparently once seriously annoyed a client, a personal friend who had actually bought something of his for a significant sum, by telling him that he had got his son to knock it out one Sunday afternoon. It is all very well selling the emperor's new clothes, but it is not a good idea to tell either him or his entourage the truth.

Out to tea and croissant and an interesting conversation with a personable young catering manager. It seems that the Tate, unlike most such places these days, has its own Tate Catering Company, or some such, charged with providing refreshments at the various Tates, which must add up to a fair sized operation. They sometimes use agency staff to cope with rushes, but, as far as possible, they use their own people. Unlike, say, Wisley, which I would have thought of the same order of size in visitor numbers, which has contracted out.

We had a go on a swing in the turbine hall, mainly occupied by school children, and tried lying under the pendulum swinging over the carpeted ramp. With the added entertainment of a cute young girl, some eight months old.

Apéritif for me at the Globe while BH shopped in the shop. Quite a pleasant place when it is not too full of bright young things making a lot of noise. Also warm and comfortable when it was cold and windy outside.

Lunch at Tas Pide, first tried  about a month ago (see references 2 and 3), involving bread, humus and a vegetarian pide (aka pizza). Last but not least, the splendid stuffed apricots that I had had last time. Still splendid. Entirely acceptable house white from Turkey, the cheapest wine on the menu. Coffee from Turkey and Armagnac from France. Service and ambience good. A décor person has done a good job on what looked to have started life as some kind of workshop. For a detail, see reference 4.

Last stop Southward Cathedral, which we last visited for the blessing of the bells noticed at reference 6. Came across a very old stone coffin just outside the nave wall. Very old stone carving of a skeletal corpse on a coffin inside. Learned that the tablet to the Southwark Bard's brother in the floor of the choir was merely commemorative; the actual place of burial was somewhere outside, unknown. Did not like the art work hung from the ceiling, a great swatch of blue netting or muslin hung from the roof. 'Doubt' by Susie MacMurray, a work which is said to link the PTSD of returning soldiers with Christ's 40 days and nights in the wilderness. I was reminded that churches, both Catholic and C of E, work quite hard at commissioning modern art - but to my mind, without much success. But then, not being a member, I don't have a vote. Wind department from Highgate School orchestra, warming up for a concert that evening, did rather better. We were told that the string department did not have to clock in until much later in the afternoon, so perhaps they were in even better shape.

Some hot cross buns from the London Bridge branch of Konditor & Cook, which came in a fine pink box in a fine pink carrier bag. I thought the buns a little stale looking when I opened them up to grill when we got home, but they toasted up OK, if a little sweet. Maybe the continentals have a bit of a sweet tooth when it comes to cake, what with all the sugar beet mentioned at reference 5.

Completed the outing with a 381 back to Waterloo.

PS: my Travelcard for this day failed on every gate that I tried. According to the ticket office at Epsom the magnetic stripes are not always magnetic enough to carry the necessary codes. Thus accounting for the occasional failure.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_45.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/steel-day.html.

Reference 3: https://www.tasrestaurants.co.uk/tas-pide.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/fake-27.html.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/fake-25.html.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/the-archdukes-daughter.html.

Reference 7: Flicker noises in astronomy and elsewhere - Press, W. H. – 1978.

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