On the way to the station, the drain cover illustrated left caught my eye. I have no idea how old it is, but the thought was that it was not the Eurocrats of Brussels who invented tiresome bureaucracy, we had been at it long before they got started. And no doubt all the other members had been too: one only has to think of all the Austrian army forms which pop up in 'The Good Soldier Švejk'. Perhaps if I gave the drain cover a bit more time I could work out what all the numbers mean.
And not for the first time, struck at the way words get cast into covers of this sort, presumably some kind of letter press to stamp the letters into the sand from which the moulds were made - but even then, it sounds rather expensive in the days when such things were done by hand, rather than by computer. Perhaps also in the days when the workers were not paid very much,
Onto the Royal Festival Hall (RFH), where I took a time out among all the mums, grans and children. Sitting, as it happens, in a corner underneath a work of art suspended from the ceiling, to be illustrated in the next post. In the meantime I wondered about how the artist would feel about being hung in some neglected corner of the RFH: I suppose, anything to be published, to be seen - with the RFH being better than the derelict saw mill used for such purposes at the Mildenhall Arts Festival. The artist in this case being a collective from the US. See reference 2 - where today, as it happens, they illustrate this very work - 'Ventricle'.
Onto Trafalgar Square, where I spent a few minutes with a group of acrobatic dancers doing the sort of thing I imagine goes down well in the noisier sort of club. Where what struck me more than their dancing, was the skill with which the barker worked the crowd: one thought that he and his troupe were going to make a fair living out of this, at least in the summer.
Popped into Canada House to take a quick look at a display about collecting neutrinos (at least, some tricky particle from the sun) at a place called Sudbury, in Canada, not the Suffolk one, famous to us for the country pikes who run around the place at night. The Canadian one is mainly famous for its nickel, but it also runs to a tourist web site. See reference 3. I also learn that Sudbury is the site of the second largest impact crater in the world, a crater which is about 2 billion years old, bigger than the one in Mexico, the one that did for the dinosaurs, and full of interesting minerals. Not so far from Ottawa, so clearly a place to visit next time we are over there.
And so to Neal's Yard Dairy where I was able to sample and buy a good lump of poacher. The cheese-man said that keeping poacher properly required a bit of TLC, which may be why it was on the way out at Waitrose: TLC too expensive when you are playing catch-up with Aldi's and Lidl's.
To Terroirs for lunch, where we had some very good bread and charcuterie. Not so keen on their cheese, mainly young, but the harder yellow cheese was quite good. More English you know. I did not get to work on their wine list - which at maybe a hundred wines long must be the longest list in a restaurant that I know - but I did get to take a few snifters of a truly excellent calvados. Staff young, foreign and friendly, including, we thought from her accent, a young lady from Canada, but we did not get to ask as she was doing something very important with a colleague on a laptop. Outside a police van and a couple of red police cars - as it happens the only police I came across the whole day - with none, rather to my surprise, to be seen at Waterloo Station.
Called in at the RFH again on the way back to the station, to find some free modern ballet on offer in the Clore Ballroom. Not usually a ballet person, but enough calvados in me to have a stab at it. To find it all rather moving and effective.
Wound up by remembering to identify what was under a strange pole top I had noticed on the way out, it turning out to be a fairground ride rather than some exotic pile driver or crane.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/shopping-in-kingston.html.
Reference 2: http://softlabnyc.com/.
Reference 3: http://www.sudburytourism.ca/.
Group search key: dca.
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