Left the train at the end of the line, that is to say Ryde Pierhead and walked back to the esplanade. From which we took a stroll on the beach, looping east and coming back through an old, sometimes smelly, passage into St. Thomas Street. Beach rather spectacular, including what appeared to be some young jellyfish, just about visible at the bottom of the illustration.
To Michelangelo's for lunch. Main course good, but a bit stingy as regards portion. Good job I had taken extra bread - which was warm, brown and ordinary - probably microwaved direct from the freezer. Dessert cheesecake very good, not one of those jello jobs so many places offer. Wine probably a Vipra Bianca Grechetto-Chardonnay from Umbria and reference 3. Quite satisfactory, and a reasonable getting on for three times what it would cost mail order. All in all a good meal, probably as good as one is going to get in Ryde.
Up through town to inspect the large church up on the hill, All Saints'. A grade two listed church, complete with a nest of derelicts in a shelter across the road. Handsome building, very large with some good stained glass, but one cannot but wonder what on earth they do with all the space. Ambience of the place much improved by the presence of somebody practising on the organ, a somebody who explained that having stopped playing for twenty years or more had done nothing for his technique. Sadly, I did not think to ask about the merits of the organ as an instrument for someone with one hand - I doubt whether such a good opportunity is going to come again any time soon. See reference 1.
Onto the bookshop towards the top of the High Street, where I was able to top up the supply of Chekov short stories with the first two volumes of the five volume edition of 1987 from Raduga of Moscow, alleged to be the successor of the Foreign Language Publishing House of Soviet times. Something over 1,000 pages in all, organised chronologically and hopefully there will not be too much overlap with the four small volumes from some rather larger number, bought by my father back in the thirties of the last century. Plus something from 1954 called 'the unknown Chekhov' from the Noonday Press of New York, described as more or less unknown works by the master. I had come across this one before I was shown where I should have been looking, but it seemed churlish to put it back. Not least because books from the US are often better made than those from the UK.
The point of the Chekov being that I had been much taken with his stories some years ago, perhaps twenty years ago now, and BH has been very much taken, very much more recently, going through our entire collection. So a topping up seemed appropriate and the stories may well provide a welcome variation to the diet of Maigret. Stories which seem to be pretty much invisible in blogland, where most of what little I can find about the man is scattered references to the plays. And completely invisible on the shelves of Epsom Library and on those of the various Epsom charity shops. Maybe people don't read foreign short stories from the end of the nineteenth century any more; as much as they can do to remember about the English classics of the same era.
And so to the station at St. John's Road for the train home, where the passengers on the train just arriving from the Pierhead were very puzzled to have to change trains. Perhaps it was the end of the driver's shift. Perhaps the train was being taken out of service - there being something of a yard at this station - for some routine maintenance or other.
PS: there may be some conflation with a visit to the Mother Goose bookshop in St. Helen's. But more on that in due course.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/pianos.html.
Reference 2: http://www.rydeallsaints.org.uk/.
Reference 3: http://www.cantinebigi.it/it/.
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