Foxglove

Fine foxgloves and broad beans at the Barbican.

Group search key: mca.

Brahms

Following the affair with Brahms' first piano quartet about two years ago now (see reference 1), it was offered last week at the new-to-us Milton Court, next to the Barbican Centre. Another boxed set affair (see reference 2) as we were offered all three quartets in one sitting.

Started off with a pair of pigeons doing a beak dance on the platform at Epsom, something I don't recall seeing before.

Continued with our now familiar No.4 bus to the Barbican where, on this occasion, we took a slightly larger room than that noticed at reference 3 - to be irritated once again by the rate you buy on not including VAT. We also took the precaution of bringing our own tea bags, milk and materials for making a light pre-concert meal, giving ourselves a break from calorific and salty snack we might otherwise have bought outside.

Across the Barbican to inspect the flower beds and micro allotments, all doing well. Found it surprisingly easy to count the floors in the tallest tower block and was rather surprised to make it more than forty.

Down to Silk Street to chat to a lady bus driver from Redbridge who had just delivered her cargo to somewhere nearby and was settling down for the five hour wait until they had finished whatever it was they were doing. Slightly awkward amount of time to fill, so she was happy enough to chat.

Into Milton Court which was very smart, and full. For some reason, not knowing the place, I had booked seats at the back of the stage, rather than at the side or at the back, presumably because the stalls were full up. These seats turned out to be rather uncomfortable for what turned out to be rather a long shift. Being directly above the piano also meant that one had a job to hear the strings - an effect which may have been compounded by it being the pianist's show. So fine music and probably well played, but I would not take such seats again.

The front of house people let people in after the off which was a bit tiresome, involving as it did a fair amount of noise. The hall was also rather warm by the end of the evening.

I was intrigued by a pair of black objects suspended from the ceiling, looking rather like outsize vacuum cleaners. But it turned out that they were state of the art loudspeakers, which might have been clearer had we been sitting in front of them, rather than behind them.

Afterwards I thought that a journey to the Hand & Shears was called for, a pub I once worked bar at, at which time it was rather a good pub. A local for a mixture of mainly market and hospital related people, run by a Czech who was very impressed by my knowledge of Švejk, with the book having something of the status of the national bible to Czechs of his generation - that is to say who had served in the British army during the second war, married an English girl and stayed. Made a good enough thing of the pub that he and his wife were able to spend their weekends doing places like the Savoy and Covent Garden. She was also a good cook and made good sandwiches - this being in those far off days when one could still buy real sandwiches in pubs.

Sadly closed this Saturday evening (as it was in my day), so we repaired to the Red Cow opposite, formerly a market porters pub, now with a vaguely long-hair-hippie feel to it. Quiet, but with enough people to be alive and we had some very pleasant wine.

The following morning we had thought to try the fine church music which was said to be had at St. Bartholomew's, but in the event we decided that we had had enough music for the weekend and, after walking part of the way, found ourselves another No.4 bus.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/affair-with-brahms-concluded.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/boxed-set.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/citadine.html.

Group search key: mca.

Was it the Oaks?

Did they jump or were they pushed?

The two caravans of Felstead Road, first noticed on 25th April and last noticed at reference 1, have now moved on, perhaps to visit friends & relations up on the Downs for the Derby meeting. A touch more than the 28 days which seems to be necessary for compulsory movings on of this sort.

There does not appear to be too much rubbish on this occasion, although I did not get close enough to inspect what had been pushed into the nettles. But there were signs of waste. A pair of children's wellingtons down by the stream. The odd large toy. And this gas bottle, the next size down from that noticed at reference 2 - a gas bottle rendered in a very lurid red by the telephone. All rather odd to my mind, thinking that the inhabitants of caravans are probably not very well off, and might do better for themselves if they did not waste or spoil so much stuff.

Pushed on to find the shutter front of my hairdresser only half up, despite there being people inside. Loitered outside for a few minutes to no avail, so pushed on again into Ewell Village where the second barber I came to was neither busy nor noisy. So for the first time in my life, I have knowingly had my hair cut by a Kurd from Iraq - a good, cheap job as it happens.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/lies.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/they-wonder-why-we-hate-them.html.

Staff suggestion

That the former owner of BHS gives the £500m he is alleged to have taken out of the company to the about to be made redundant workers, by way of helping them on their way to new careers. My calculator says that this would work out at around £50,000 a head, almost certainly more than a year's pay for most of them.

The personnel people could earn their crust by deciding who exactly was going to be eligible for this windfall and how exactly it was going to be divi'd up. Lots of scope for nasty arguments around the margins when that sort of money is at stake. While HMRC could think about whether income tax was payable.

PS: this morning, the phrase 'the devil is in the detail' came to mind. I don't know whether this is the sort of thing from whence the phrase sprang, but one can certainly see that what, in this case, starts as a work of charity, can soon descend, once one gets down to detail, down to brass tacks, to use another colloquialism, into unseemly squabbling. Whatever rules the personnel people come up with, with this number of people, say 10,000, there are always going to be people at the margins of those rules who feel cheated. What about, for example, the chap on unpaid paternity leave who did not work at all in the reference period? What about the contract cleaners, not on the BHS payroll at all?

End of Chopin as in shopping

Last week saw my last concert from the Mailley-Smith complete works at St. John's, my fourth, having missed one of the intended five from the series of eleven.

Failed to score any points at Earlsfield on the way out, but, having decided not to Bullingdon on this occasion, got to use the rush hour exit from Vauxhall Station (Royal Vauxhall Tavern side), probably for the first time since I retired, getting on for ten years ago now. Plus a walk up Goring Street, left into Glasshouse Street and out onto the Embankment. To find, on the small bit of grass outside Lord Archer's London residence, some kind of Hindu memorial added to the Bullingdon stand already there. I suppose that with the recent rash of such things, they are getting a bit short of place to put them. But someone cared enough to decorate it, presumably fairly recently as I would have thought that there would be too many passing drunks for such decoration to last very long.

A little early, so I paid a visit to the Marquis of Granby in Romney Street, where I got a quite drinkable white wine for little more than a fiver. Pleasant atmosphere, but puzzled by there being lots of brown wood, including wainscots, but there not being sash windows, rather casements with swing windows above. Checking outside, there were sashes and brown bricks to the second floor, so perhaps there was a between the wars makeover.

Audience thinning out for this ninth concert of the series, but with Mailley-Smith appearing to have pulled something of a Sloane fan club. Lots of frocks.

The four scherzi, the main business of the concert, I did not greatly care for, although there were some good passages. A bit too virtuoso for my taste. But I was very taken with the five mazurkas, numbers 41 through 45. Mailley-Smith was playing without scores and said he was going to play 51 through 55, so one does wonder. How many people in the audience would have known the difference? Not me, that's for sure. But the Chopin Society had been sighted on previous occasions, so perhaps someone would have.

The lady behind me, perhaps a little younger than I, was not very used to being in churches and was wondering out loud where the altar might have been. Sitting inside I was having trouble working out in which direction the altar was pointing, but checking this morning find that, unusually, it was pointing west, with the main entrance with steps being on the north side of the church, looking over Lord North Street, the street where the late Harold Wilson lived for some years. I associate to a lecturer, I think the one noticed at reference 1, who told us about trouble with the direction of Mecca from a prayer mat in the US. Should one take the great circle route - more north than east from there - or not? Apparently the matter reached the civil courts.

However, the west windows over the altar did need cleaning and I was right that the organ was at the river end of the church, that is to say the east end.

The young lady next to me came from Watford and was able to tell me that the Orphanage where I once used to work, to the extent of growing marrows there, was now a housing estate. And the chap next to her came from Hornchurch in darkest Essex, although his accents did not suggest car or any other kind of factory. Perhaps there are good bits.

Rather lazily, got a taxi most of the way back to Vauxhall, with the result that I just caught the 2128 to Epsom, which was good, as we were due out again the evening following. Just can't do it these days.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/john-nash.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mailley. For the other Mailley-Smith concerts.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/fliter.html. For the splendid South American performance of the preludes.

World history

Some time ago I posted the history of the world in terms of the sequence of the various empires which had ruled important chunks of world, ending as I recall with the US for the 20th century and China for the 21st. Annoyingly, despite diligent search, I cannot now find this post - although, unhelpfully, I have the notion that the all important search terms are hidden in a picture of part of an Excel worksheet. But perhaps it will come back to me.

In the meantime, prompted by some chance findings over the last couple of days, I offer a logarithmic history in terms of inventions.

We started to come down from the trees of Africa about 4,000,000 years ago.

Then 400,000 years ago saw the invention of cooking, as attested by finds in an important wood near Bury St. Edmunds.

40,000 years ago saw the invention of music, somewhere on the Danube, as attested by the picture above.

4,000 years ago saw the invention of writing, somewhere in the Middle East.

400 years ago saw the invention of science as we know it, somewhere in Western Europe. With God catching an ultimately fatal disease at about the same time.

40 years ago saw the invention of the personal computer.

And four years ago (very roughly) saw the invention of social life with Facebook and Twitter.

PS: having now spent quality time on the search, the missing post has been traced to reference 1. It looks like a Powerpoint slide, so wrong about the worksheet. But right that all the words which might have helped the search along were inside the picture, searching pictures for words not yet being part of the google offering, at least not in this context. In the end, it was a crude, sledgehammer search for 'history' which did the business. 'Empire' not in it at all, not even in the picture. And I was never going to remember about the Jutes. Searching the monthly backups did not do the business, despite the Word search feature being quite good for this sort of thing. Months are too big to be an appropriate target for a search, with even quite obscure words cropping up often enough in the course of a month to give one lots of false positives.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=angles+jutes+saxons.

Bard with Bacon

Two breakfast thoughts arising from yesterday's Guardian.

First, as a well above average consumer of Bardic affairs, I thought that the letter illustrated was a splendid contribution to the present debate between the RSC and the Globe about how best to cut the Bard so that first the audience understand and enjoy what is going on and second that there is enough left for the game to be worth the candle. That one has shown respect for the original material.

I wonder what my mother who, possibly like the writer of this letter, spent many years teaching Shakespeare to comprehensive (or, more precisely, village college) children, with some success, would have made of it.

Second, some coverage of the Battle of Jutland caught my eye. Coverage which pointed out that while we lost more men and ships than the Germans in the battle, the Germans did not care to renew the fight the next day and we, in some part, went on to win the war in consequence.

I was reminded of the observation in Admiral Bacon's book, noticed at reference 1, that if you wanted to have command of the seas, you had to be prepared to fight for it - and take losses. No more free lunches here than elsewhere.

PS: from the half hour or so that I saw of the BBC's televised version of the 'Midsummer's Night Dream' the other evening, I thought that they failed the second of the above tests. An imaginative and sometimes entertaining effort though - so B for effort and C for attainment as they used to write on my report card at school.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-dover-patrol.html.