Bacon hunt

A good start to the day in that I discovered someone else, other than myself, makes good use of folding bulldog clips, if that is the right name for them. I use my rather larger ones as bicycle clips, here they are used to hold up a poster about something or other. A little careless, in that the one on the right is a smaller size than that on the left. Very untidy.

Good start continued in that a suit (well almost a suit. He was wearing a sports jacket rather than a suit jacket) saw me eying the nearly new copy of the Times next to him and thought to make me a gift of it, it not having been his in the first place. Second time such a thing has happened recently. See reference 2. Furthermore, the Times was not as bad as I had been expecting. I suppose I tend to assume, not quite fairly, that it is down there with its stable mate, the Sun.

First leg on the Bullingdon from the bottom of the ramp (for once) at Waterloo to Roscoe Street in 16 minutes and 59 seconds, 14 seconds slower than on the last occasion noticed at reference 1. I offer no excuse. Not for the first time I noticed a down side of the new two way cycle path up Farringdon Street: the fact that you sometimes have dispatch riders coming at you at a good speed, not something one had to contend with when one was allowed to use the road. Nevertheless, on balance, the cycle path is better for cyclists than the road. There is even a plus for car drivers in that most of the cyclists have been taken out of their way. No more cutting in and out.

There was a big queue outside the Farringdon Road KFC, although not quite as big as that outside the gray Citroën van doing eastern food of some sort in Whitecross Street. I prefer bacon sandwich so continued to the Market Restaurant where they were on their usual good form.

A Finnish flavoured day at St. Luke's with a string quartet from Finland, Meta4, and a UK première of Mustonen's piano quintet. Followed by Shostakovich's, this one being last heard at the event noticed at reference 3, something over a month previous.

Meta4 played mostly standing. Two of them were wearing striking shoes and the second violin, a shorter lady, was partially hidden behind her music which made her look rather odd from where I was sitting. While the cello had a nicely made wooden stand to get him up to height. The piano player, a Scot who sounded Northern Irish to me, did very well on the hoof with the impossibly pseudy questions from the Radio 3 presenter, Fiona Talkington - originally a fine arts person, as regular readers may recall.

Mustonen does not seem to run to a website, but according to Schott, 'Olli Mustonen is a postmodern composer building a bridge over Western classical music from baroque to minimalism, from late romanticism to the new spirituality of the 21st century. Music can capture the secret of life – a current of sounds ... His music transports the idea of direct experience, an ability that has sunk into oblivion in these technocratic times'. This apart, this quintet was very loud and a lot of it was very fast. Not without merit, but not something I would need to hear terribly often.

I thought that they did rather well with the Shostakovich quintet (Op.57) which followed, with lots of stuff which was new to me, despite my having heard it many times, maybe ten times in the last ten years alone, not counting private views at home. For once, I quite liked being near the front, in the second row, with the instruments a little above eye level. And I quite liked it not being as consistently loud as the Mustonen. From where I associate to the claim once made in Tooting that popular music does not do rests in the way of classical music. Who do I know who might know the truth of this matter?

Second leg from Berry Street, Clerkenwell to Stamford Street, South Bank took 15 minutes and 24 seconds. The improvement on the week before not being down to the smaller intake at Wetherspoon's this time around, rather to not completing the journey to the top of the ramp at Waterloo.

No bread at all in the Cornwall Road branch of Konditor and Cook, their being the reason why I had stopped short at Stamford Street. I suppose you get a lot more revenue to the space in the oven and to the space on the shelf with cakes than you do with bread. Plus the English seem to be curiously uninterested in good bread: they would much rather spend their time and money on cake. Very unhealthy of them.

PS: no trolleys in Roscoe Street on this occasion.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/trios.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/bbb.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/widmann-and-others.html.

Reference 4: http://meta4.fi/. Not to be confused with the HR operation of the same name.

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