Padella

Last week to London Bridge, for what turned out to be another visit to the Barrow Boy & Banker, but which turned up the new-to-me, newly fashionable Italian flavoured eatery known as Padella. See reference 1.

The outing started with a stink of burning plastic and what appeared to be a large cloud of black smoke over Court Rec., but which turned out to be a fire behind Sainsbury's, on the Kiln Lane industrial estate. Probably one of the many car dealers there, with the result that the intended train to Waterloo was cancelled and I had to take a chance on a Victoria train, from the poorly performing rail franchise called Southern. The train ran OK, but the overall effect was rather spoiled by the on-board announcements being garbled by the computer in an odd way, with bits of one announcement finding their way into another announcement. There was also some serious track-side piling going on at Balham, with lots of hard-core tubes of reinforcing bars - maybe a foot wide by ten feet long - lying around, ready for insertion into the newly drilled holes.

No aeroplanes to be seen at Clapham Junction, despite it being a propitious time of day (early evening, the time of the daily rush from Brussels and other, suchlike places) but there were trains to Waterloo, where I arrived without further incident to take a Bullingdon (once again without bell) from the pole position at the top of the ramp. Lots of cyclists about, but I made it to the Hop Exchange in 11 minutes and 8 seconds.

To find a monster queue outside Padella, a place which I do not recall seeing before. What is it that makes young people happy to queue for half an hour or more to get their dose of pasta - when there were probably dozens of other, pasta capable restaurants within ten minutes walk?

And so into a quiet Barrow Boy & Banker, where not only was the service as friendly and efficient as usual, but I also managed to grab a table. Only spoiled by rather loud music coming from the loudspeakers hung all around the walls. Noticed, for the first time, all the front doors of safety deposit boxes doing service as wallpaper. Fair enough, given that the place probably used to be a branch of a substantial bank.

By the time I went back past Padella, there was a sign saying that queueing had closed for the evening, although there was still a small queue.

Pulled the return Bullingdon (once again without bell. There is clearly a problem with bells) from the Hop Exchange for the return journey of 10 minutes and 10 seconds, only livened up by much cheering from some football people in a tent erected in some courtyard in Southwark Streeet. Parked at position 4 on the ramp, slightly puzzled as to why the TFL contractors were still taking Bullingdons out of the stand at 2130, given that they would want the stand to be full the following morning. Perhaps it is like the council grass cutting contractors: they just do what it says in their instructions without regard to the circumstances of the day?

On the way back to Epsom, the advertisements illustrated above caught my eye, particularly the one for NOWTV, second left. Something else which was new-to-me, clearly getting out of touch out in the sticks of Epsom - but see reference 2. But what struck me was the grouping of what I took to be three very successful television series - I had, after all, heard of two of them and actually watched one of them - presented in this promiscuous way. My thoughts went out to the chap who had produced one of them, had poured his heart & soul into it for months, if not years, to find himself stuck up in some advertisement for cut-price provision, along with a couple of competitors. For the entertainment of the punters, for them to weigh the pros and cons and possibly to select me. Or not, as the case may be. A bit like the author of a book of transient fame, who wanders into some store like the Works, to find great piles of his magnum opus knocked down to 99p, for clearance.

I have wondered about this sort of thing before in the context of artists (of pictures that is), exhibiting their wares, all the product of much of said heart & soul, for the eyes of the profane, the profane whose pennies and pounds are needed to pay the butcher and baker. But the one artist whom I asked, said that one got used to it. Also in the context of the pin-up girl in the Sun, who finds her picture, in a state of some undress, being used to wrap chips for some drunk in the local chippie. I associate to the snippet from Cormac McCarthy about the Apache chief who insisted that the pencil portrait that some itinerant artist had drawn of him be buried in the floor of a cave where no-one would find and abuse it. A chief who clearly understood my sensitivities in this matter.

Then to my father who tried to get a précis of his magnum opus onto the radio in the form of an interval talk, a regular feature of Third Programme life at the time. He just wanted some air time and no longer cared that he would have been sandwiched between what, for the audience, would have been more substantial fare.

Then to the fact that it is often best to have a third party punt one's wares. So if you are selling a house you use and agent and if you are selling a newfangled bicycle you use a salesman. With the agent and the salesman better able to do a good job because they do not care in the way that you do. They only care about their commission.

Then to the fact that one often talks about great works of art being very deep, so deep that one is always finding new things. Deep things which the artist had carefully crafted, but which the casual consumer might or might not notice. The one artist mentioned above knew about this too, and knew that there were limits to what you should pour into your work - because people did not notice. Which, in the end, mattered. The effort of production by me should be proportionate to the quality of consumption by others; the act of production is not enough of itself alone. I'm not sure that I agree with this and I not sure that Eric Gill would have agreed with this either - but that is a matter to which I shall return in due coure.

Waterloo trains by then working and fire engines, blue lights, police and stink were still present at Kiln Lane at 2200. Presumably they had moved into investigation mode.

Reference 1: https://www.padella.co/.

Reference 2: https://www.nowtv.com/.

Reference 3: https://www.theworks.co.uk/. The source, as it happens, of one good book about the Household Cavalry (famous for the Cavalry Bridge, over the Souleuvre, of the Normandy campaign. Now on the D56. See gmaps around 48.9471345, -0.8906607) and another about India. The former with good pictures and the latter with lots of pages.