A sunny, breezy and cool morning; cool enough that I remembered to take a scarf.
Female fashion statement from Japan on the Waterloo Concourse: black leggings (or perhaps boots) to just above the knee. Clear fishnet stockings to upper thigh. Black shorts and so on up to the head. Very fetching.
Pulled a first Bullingdon to do Waterloo Station 1, Waterloo to Roscoe Street, St. Luke's in 19 minutes and 40 seconds. I conspicuous violator: white, thirty something, scruffy, perhaps in some kind of creative employment.
Restaurant in Whitecross Street busy. Manager out back, familiar waitress out front, with two more newbies. Bacon sandwich fine, bread a little pale, so perhaps they have changed their baker.
Somewhere along the way I came across two bicycles with stretched front parts, something like a delivery bike of old (the ones which were really heavy to pedal) but with a long low basket. Low, I suppose, to keep the centre of gravity down, possibly battery assisted but I did not think to look how the steering worked. Was the front wheel at the front, or in the middle, as it were?
St. Luke's churchyard full of foodies eating street-food from the stalls and vans in Whitecross Street. Eating it out of single use plastic tubs - so they might have been foodies, but they were not ecos. Maybe in a year or so, the market inspectors will be checking up on that sort of thing - assuming we still have market inspectors when the Tories have finished smashing up the big state.
St. Luke's itself pretty full again. A very varied programme from Ólafsson, a regular cornucopia, a lot of it new to me. I enjoyed it more than I had expected, usually preferring to have my programme in bigger lumps. In introducing his encore, Ólafsson explained how he found traces of Bach in everybody who followed, so he thought it appropriate to suggest how Bach had built on what went before him, by giving us Bach's transcription of an oboe concerto by Marcello. Rather good. Wikipedia knows all about it, as can be seen from reference 1.
Pulled a second Bullingdon to do Finsbury Leisure Centre, St. Luke's to High Holborn , Covent Garden in 17 minutes and 59 seconds. Rather more violators down Clerkenwell Road. From High Holborn a short walk to the cheese shop, on this occasion to be served by an English girl. Plus I bought some fine apples, possibly Charles Ross, around 10% of the price of the cheese, by weight.
Crown looked a bit busy and noisy to me, so strolled down to Gordon's where I have been meaning to pay a visit for years. A famous establishment which I might have used half a dozen times in thirty years. Splendid choice of wine if you wanted a bottle, not bad it you wanted a glass and I settled for an Australian Riesling. Sat out on the terrace where some foreigners were eating, drinking and smoking all at the same time. Those were the days!
Then, in honour of the read noticed at reference 2, along the Embankment Gardens to inspect the Sullivan memorial there. One forgets how pleasant these gardens are, with all their exotic plants and memorials. Including, for example, a small memorial to Buxton's Camel Corps - including its large Australian contingent. But then they did - perhaps still do - use camels in the outback in the glory days of exploration.
Then, finding myself at the river entrance to the Savoy went in there to admire the fine ballroom, where I was gathered up by a pleasant young lady and dispatched upstairs in an ancient electric lift, said to be the first such installed in London. Red plush, brown wood bench and reproductions of posters for G&S operas. From their into a high tea flavoured restaurant from where I was directed to the American Bar upstairs.
This turned out to be very art deco, very Poirot. Lots of flunkies, one of whom sat me down and gave me a menu. Service very slow, and the place started to fill up while I waited. Eventually I collared a flunky and placed an order for wine - good and about three times the price it would have been at a public house, which I thought fair enough. Nice line in nibbles. Lots of security cameras, much the same red globes as you get on tube trains.
Got talking to the lady next door, about my age, on her annual month's holiday in Europe from her small winery in Irvine in California, with sundry family members, then absent. Much stronger on the wine small talk than I was, and her theory was that tasting hundreds of wines in the course of a day at a wine fair was nonsense; the palette would give up after five or six. A sentiment with which I completely agreed, rarely making it beyond that number in the beer fairs of old before I settled down to one that I liked. For a contrary view see reference 3. A plus was that she was a proper customer rather than a walk-in like myself, and her conversation lifted my standing with the flunkies.
The conversation touched on Germany and Germans, and I alleged that at one point there was serious talk about making German the official language of the US, which she thought was a bit far fetched, despite the massive influx of Germans from the eighteenth century on and suggested that I check when I got home. Which I did, to find that I was indeed wrong, although there was some truth behind the error, in the form of a proposal that government documents should be translated into German. While now, after two wars with Germany, there is not much spoken German in the US, although there are maybe 50 million people who claim German descent. Certainly one comes across plenty of German sounding family names, not least General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr.
Another customer sported lots of white hair tied back in a short pony tail.
Brisk head wind as I strolled back over Hungerford Bridge. Good thing I had remembered my scarf on this occasion.
A little later, struck by the huge amount of rubbish by the gas holders as we pulled into Epsom. Presumably the work of our travelling friends, for whom there was a public campsite nearby. Public to the extent that you were allowed to use it if you came from the right family but not otherwise. Or so the respectable town gossip has it.
No rubbish to be seen in the satellite picture offered by Gmaps at reference 51.337105, -0.2635278, despite the only dates to be seen being 2018. A huge amount of rubbish to appear in six months or so.
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oboe_Concerto_(Marcello).
Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/sullivan.html.
Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/07/wine-shipper.html.
Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language_in_the_United_States.
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