Back on the Bullingdon

Bullingdon season started last week, but off to a bad start when I lost the apostrophe on my telephone, that is to say on its virtual keyboard. I was absolutely sure it had gone missing, but when I backed out and started again there it was. Clearly either Cortana or I had been having a senior moment.

No improvement when I got to the ramp at Waterloo, say around noon, to find just one Bullingdon there, taking in all three stands. Luckily, by the time that I had found out that this one Bullingdon was out of service, somebody had turned up and deposited one that was clearly in service.

So on the road to Roscoe Street, to find Stamford Street as busy as last time, with the added attraction of an older Bullingdon rider, short gray, grizzled hair and no helmet, who had a very aggressive style at traffic lights and such. All perfectly legal, within the letter of the highway code, but aggressive. Perhaps a chap who needed to prove how fit he was. Took the last vacant slot at Roscoe Street. Perhaps management is having to cut corners, costs or both.

I didn't recognise the fruit & veg. man at Whitecross Street and he had no walnuts, so that was not much good either. But the thin waitresses had returned to the Market Restaurant (café no more, see reference 1), although one of them had metamorphosed from brunette to blonde. Still both from the same country though as they could natter to each other in foreign. Bacon sandwich satisfactory, right bread but a little stale.

St. Luke's more or less full for this opening concert of the season, with people without tickets being sent up to the balcony. Not tried it, but I think I would prefer where I was, downstairs towards the back of the front block of seats.

The Škampa String Quartet were standing in at short notice, which may be the reason we got Janáček's Kreutzer Sonata, a work which they knew well, since their student days with the Smetana Quartet. Both that and Smetana's String Quartet No.1 were very good, with the Kreutzer sounding as fresh and new as if I had never heard it before, which was not the case. See, for example, reference 2.

One connection with the Tolstoy story of the same name, was the passion, with Janáček, as an old man, having an unconsummated passion for the very young wife of someone else. I was slightly puzzled by both the programme and the producer talking of alleged adultery in the story, while I had thought that there was no question about it at all. Checking quickly yesterday, I think the story is that while the husband did not have proof, he had strong grounds for suspicion. So perhaps part of the point of the story is that he could not have been sure. Perhaps also a reading which will not survive the more careful reading to come.

The quartet's seating plan was violin 1, violin 2, cello, viola, with the cello taking the piano stool. And at one point violin 1 stood to turn the page, from in front of the stand, of viola opposite, something I have never seen before. The stringing of the cello was new to me in that the tail piece was cut diagonally. Was the idea to have strings of equal length, something a conventional stringing would not give? Google not help on this occasion, so I shall have to ask next time I pass a violin shop, of which there are a few about in London.

Quick refreshment in the 'Masque Haunt', then picked up the second Bullingdon at Old Street. Having taken wine, I chickened out of the Old Street roundabout and walked the Bullingdon across the road. Cheated further by walking it around the irritating no left turn from Clerkenwell Road into Farringdon Road. Otherwise without incident, apart from noticing one again that I no longer find the shiny black office block at the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge as exciting as I did when it was new. Whatever it was that it had has largely, although not entirely, worn off.

Quick call at Konditor & Cook where I fell for the four for a tenner offer. So four slices of a sort of lemon tart, an almond and continental version of our own lemon drizzle cake. Very nice they were too, if more substantial than they looked. BH said that that was down to their involving almond as well as or instead of regular flour.

Arrived at Waterloo in between trains, so wound up the proceedings with a glass of Lofthouse, a NZ sauvignon blanc, from the wine bar at platform 1, the gewürztraminer which they had offered in the past having gone off-piste. Not sure about the year, but rather good; maybe I shall make enquiries at Majestic. See reference 3.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/henry-iv-part-i-part-i.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/endellions.html.

Reference 3: http://www.lofthousewine.co.nz/Lofthouse-Vineyard-Our-Wine-__I.96.

Road manners

From time to time I moan about cycle ways and cyclists, but today it is the turn of the four wheelers. This being a not very satisfactory snap of an unsightly rut across the road from the new West Hill cycleway, caused by someone mounting the kerb, crossing the footpath and then getting stuck into the wet grass. Can't imagine what he or she might have been doing.

But despite several efforts, none of the resulting snaps captures the ugliness of the rut. Perhaps one needed to be able to stand in the road to do the job properly.

Three into one reprised

Just to illustrate the difference. But the reader is spared the other eighteen.

PS 1: disaster! Blunder! I have only just noticed, a week into the new blog, that the current default blog template is not only an unsightly orange, but the search button has vanished. This last being a serious matter as google search is not very good for blog posts.

PS 2: later. Changing the template seems to have got me back to the volume 2 experience. Easy peasy. Now I have to resist the temptation to be playing with the template tool - which, apart from anything else, is going to be full of traps for the unwary, like any other sophisticated tool - and I think I am too accident prone for that sort of play to be a good idea.

Group search key: tpa.

Three into one

It was three ponds into one yesterday, even before what looks like the considerable rain of last night.

Having taken about 20 snaps of the same scene, it was striking this morning how much they varied from one to another. One can see why the serious photographer got through rolls and rolls of film to get the right shot - or at least that is what they do in films from the sixties. I suppose the people who take the nature snaps that find their way to the newspapers must do much the same thing; thousands of snaps taken for every one published.

Perhaps I ought to exercise the same discipline on my hundreds of words!

PS: works better large than small.

Group search key: tpa.

A spark from the anvil of academe

I was reading ‘Beyond the Archive’ by one Jens Brockmeier this morning, finding the going a bit heavy, when I stumbled across the word palace, in a context of memory and metaphor. At which I sparked up and drifted off into a world of fancy. A fanciful world of memory.

Many people have thought of memory in terms of the memory palace, a large and complicated place with lots of rooms, all sorts of shapes and sizes, lots of doors, corridors and stairs. A palace which is really a fancy warehouse for memories, us humans not caring to have something as crude and effective as the computerised & roboterised warehouse which might be run by the likes of Amazon or the database which might be run by the likes of the Oracle Corporation. One aspect of the palace being its size, but another being its luxury and yet another being the fact that a palace is usually built for a king. There is someone in charge, there is someone for whom the palace was built.

A palace with lots of space, but also a palace in which things, that is to say memories, can get lost, can be hard to find, even when one has a map. Perhaps I have lost the keys to some of the rooms. Perhaps some of the rooms are closed for maintenance. Perhaps the lighting is poor, or at least patchy. The cellars are dark & dank while the state rooms, with their large windows, are quite light – even if rather cold – thinking here of some of the large rooms in some of the large houses operated by the National Trust.

But then, taking a leaf out of the Brockmeier book, what about memories which have a life their own? That wander about the palace, perhaps play dressing up or hide and seek. Perhaps play games with the palace-master. A personage who might or might not be the same as the king, the owner of the memories, that is to say you. Might be some alter. Memories which are more like people of flesh & blood in their own right than the inert & inanimate tablets of stone we sometimes talk about when thinking of a very permanent record. See reference 1 for a discussion of the Biblical origin of the phrase.

A memory palace which is also like an elaborate dolls’ house sitting on a table in my study and into which I post my memories, completed with a luggage label, hoping that I will be able to get them back if I talk nicely to the concierge. Or send in my drone (from Maplin) to look for them.

More or less a self-contained community, perhaps something like a monastery. Maybe a modern monastery, with its own broadband connection to the internet. Enclosed, but throbbing with a life of its own, operating at some different level from that of the owner. This last being the chap who pays the gas bill for the gas fire which keeps the study at a reasonable temperature during the long winters. But who doesn’t really understand what is going on inside the dolls’ house.

PS 1: we also have the memory palaces of Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary to China who played for his supper, as it were, by doing prodigious tricks of memory for the emperor and his court.

PS 2: I associate now to the animated and sometimes malevolent files conjured up by the narrator of the book noticed at reference 2.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablets_of_Stone.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-paperkeepers-tale.html.

Error of judgement

At some point last week the Guardian headlined the performance of Hamlet put on by the Globe Theatre in the refugee camp which persists outside Calais. I believe this to have been an error of judgement; the Globe theatre is a charity, albeit a theatrical one, and as such has no business in political grandstanding of this sort. Particularly when they are wrong, with my view being that the refugee camp should not be there and that one should do nothing beyond providing basic life support. Make the place into a palace and it will draw the million and one refugees (or economic migrants, as you will) who think that the streets of London are paved with gold. In the round, despite being no Tory and not much of a little Englander, I sign up to the Cameron line that these people need to be contained, managed and processed near to their point of departure, not encouraged to scale the fences of the Eurotunnel goods yard in Calais. Tragic though their situation may be.

To be fair to the Globe, this was not their venture. The venture belonged to an outfit called Good Chance - but it was their actors and actresses.

Digressing, I wonder whether the appointment of a new artistic director at the Globe, a director (rather directress) who was alleged in the pub to have practically made a boast of knowing nothing of Shakespeare, was another error of judgement.

Observations from the Guardian like 'particularly at the Globe where the World Shakespeare season demonstrated that Shakespeare really can be our contemporary when we don’t treat the plays as sacred literary texts but possibilities for performance' do not encourage me. Nor do snippets from the Kneehigh Theatre (where the new director earned her spurs) like '... Proudly, we now find ourselves celebrated as one of Britain's most exciting touring theatre companies. We create vigorous, popular theatre for a broad spectrum of audiences, using a multi-talented group of performers, directors, designers, sculptors, engineers, musicians and writers. We use a wide range of art forms and media as our ‘tool kit' to make new and accessible forms of theatre. A spontaneous sense of risk and adventure produces extraordinary dramatic results. Themes are universal and local, epic and domestic'.

The Globe is already quite good at song & dance and getting bums on seats. But are they keeping their eye on the Shakespearian ball?

PS: at least Past Master Brown, made a sensible contribution to the debate about managing the migration to come last week. Perhaps in the very same edition of the Guardian as headlined 'Hamlet goes to Calais'.

Arden 3

The clips from Germany, mentioned in the post before last. I wonder how close Rymans could get to them?

Note that the brassy look you get when you click to enlarge is spurious, an artefact of the flash on the telephone.

I don't suppose that the telephone I was using last March could have managed such a close-up. At least, I can't find one, not in the place where it would have been archived, that is to say C:\Users\Jim\Pictures\From Jimphone\Extract-20150520.

PS: whatever will happen to all this stuff when I get a new PC?

Group search key: ara