Despite Waterloo station being quiet, no working Bullingdons on the ramp, so I was reduced to getting over to Concert Hall Approach No.2 where I was suited and was able to set off to the Finsbury Leisure Centre. In the course of which I am sorry to say that I noticed that bicycle manners had fallen off a bit since my last outing, the week before. Pedestrians bad also in that I got shouted at by a gent. with a beard who thought to cross the road, through more or less stationary traffic, without waiting to see whether I was stopping or not - which I wasn't. So I got expletived.
There seemed to be a lot of waiting at lights, but I should add, in fairness, that once I was over Blackfriars Bridge, the new cycleway seemed to come with cycle friendly streaming.
The irritating lady from Radio 3 was still at it, but she did get one bit right. We had Robin Tritschler (tenor) accompanied by Ian Burnside (piano) giving us a selection of Mozart and Tchaikovsky songs, never before heard by me (this despite Tritschler claiming that we were bound to know some of the Tchaikovsky tunes, even if we did not know who had written them), with the form being that the lady from Radio 3 gave us a very short summary of the songs, in groups of three or four, before each group was sung. This meant that one had some idea of what was going on without having to read the text given in the programme at the same time as paying attention to the stage - which last does not work very well for me. Another way of achieving this might be to flash the summary up on a screen at the back for a few seconds before each song, but turning projector and screen off for the songs themselves. Perhaps I should suggest this to the people at the Wigmore Hall; much better than having the full text competing with the music for your attention.
I also wondered how many of the people in the audience would have preferred to have the Russian versions of the Tchaikovsky songs given in Cyrillics, rather than Romans. I suppose the argument for Romans was that some people like to follow the words, even if they don't know what they mean. I then wondered what the singer sang from. Did he have Russian up his sleeve? He certainly had a good voice.
Some humour, not least in the song illustrated above. I knew the Viennese were a bit louche, but I had not thought that the great Mozart would have put his pen to this sort of stuff. Very entertainingly sung by Tritschler - much better live than YouTube can manage. I was reminded, in a similar context but from another continent, of locker room talk of fresh vegetables.
Out to tea and bacon sandwich in the Market Café, much quieter after the concert than it would have been before, then pulled a second Bullingdon at Roscoe Street and headed off for London Bridge, thinking that I could manage by heading through the middle of the city. With the result that I got lost on a Bullingdon with badly slipping gears and a possibility that it would rain. The Tower of London loomed up ahead and I chickened out, abandoning the Bullingdon at somewhere called Crosswall, Tower. But I did manage to tell the system that the Bullingdon was faulty, wondering the while how long it would take a mechanic to find out what was wrong - given all that he would know would be that something was wrong. Probably not detectable unless you actually tried to ride the thing for a few hundred yards.
Picked up the third Bullingdon of the day at Great Tower Street and made it to the Hop Exchange at London Bridge without further incident.
Into Borough Market to buy my cheese from the big branch of Neal's Yard Dairy there, a large piece of Poacher and a small piece of something called Riseley. A small round cheese, with a reddish rind and a soft white interior, a young cheese, from England but of the Brie type. Very good. Reference 1 looks to know all about it - except there is nothing reddish about the rind in their picture. So not sure about them. Is there a confusion between Riseley the place (in Berkshire) and Riseley the cheese?
Rounded off my shopping with some Santana apples (also never before heard of) from the Chegworth people mentioned last week and to be found at reference 2. Very good again, so the Chegworth record so far this season is good.
Wanting to get to Tooting, I thought about pedaling across to Stockwell, but decided against and caught the tube - climbing the steps out at Tooting by way of a bit of compensatory exercise. Took refreshment there and headed back west for a spot of aeroplane spotting at Earlsfield to round off the day. This proved to be interesting with the planes dropping out of the cloud at around 1300-1400 (with straight down the line to London being 1200) and dipping into the trees at around 2100. There was a steady procession of aeroplanes coming in and it should have been just about possible to get a two, but the best I could do in the 15 minutes I had, just having missed a train, was a couple of near misses, One very near. The force was not with me.
On the train two bits of entertainment. A pair of ladies, one looking to be local and one perhaps from the Phillipines, talking a language which I could not place at all, but eventually settled for Scandinavian not otherwise specified, with the train being a bit too crowded for me to be able to decently ask. Then a gent. taking his cute toddler home from play group. While it was not clear that that was what he was, I decided that I would not have been much cop at being a house husband.
Reference 1: http://www.lafromagerie.co.uk/wigmore/.
Reference 2: http://www.chegworthvalley.com/.
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