Trolley 112

Captured in Stones Road and returned to the special needs bay at Kiln Lane.

Same format basket as the regular Sainsbury's trolley (see, for example, reference 1), but a much more heavily built frame. Heavy enough, I should think, to carry things like 25kg bags of rice on the bottom shelf. Do they sell anything like at Kiln Lane?

Heavy enough also to be rather awkward to wheel on the not very level pavement of Middle Lane. Particularly when one is also worrying about slipping on the frost - something I do worry about having had a couple of falls in the past couple of months or so. Full of dark thoughts about how falls often used to be fatal - carrying off, for one, my maternal grandmother, whose broken hip led to pneumonia.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/trolley-110.html.

Winter journey

Following the rehearsal (as it were) noticed at reference 1, last week to the Wigmore Hall to hear Mark Padmore and Mitsuko Uchida do Schubert's Winterreise.

Started out on Epsom platform by the sight of an advertising hoarding showing off bad behaviour by a male model, that is to say standing outside, grinning at us with a large and expensive radio sitting on his shoulder. Just the sort of thing that FIL tried to bear down on beaches in the west country - with rather mixed success. No idea what the hoarding was supposed to be advertising, apart from bad behaviour.

We then find that the trains are in disarray for a variety of reasons and elect to take a Southern train to Victoria, which involved standing until Sutton, but it did get us there, taking only a few more minutes that the proper train would have done.

Onto Wigmore Hall to find that we were at a gala occasion, probably the reason why we had been consigned to row M. The artists had donated their fees to the Wigmore Hall, there were various posh looking people in the bar and we were to be addressed by the director. An address which mainly consisted of telling us that he had just got back from Vienna where it was rather cold. Perhaps he had been to some concert hall directors' conference there, where, in between their wienerschnitzels, they told each other what they were doing about the loss of government grants and exchanged views about the best people to get to refurbish one's seats.

The hall was full, but luckily for us the two seats in front of us were empty, perhaps caught up in the trains, which meant we both had excellent, full body views.

Uchida marked the occasion by being rather more smartly turned out than she had been for the RFH the week before (see reference 2), to the extent of wearing a white sash. I had worried that as a premier league piano player, she would attempt to steal the occasion, but in the event she did not. In fact, she did very well indeed, bringing out a lot of bits of the piano parts that I had not really heard before. Only occasionally did I feel she was a little too loud.

Padmore also excellent, with great power and range, neatly but not flashily turned out and with stage manners to match. Contrary to the paternal line that one should end loud, he ended rather quiet - but managed to pack a lot of punch into his quiet.

Regarding the words, the same form as last time. I watched the stage while BH watched the words. I am clearly losing out, but on this occasion I wondered how many of the words a German speaker would actually catch, assuming that he (or she) did not know them by heart - with my finding quite a lot of singing in English quite difficult from that point of view.

Back at Vauxhall the trains were still in disarray with a rather disconsolate small crowd by the gates listening to the words of wisdom of a station attendant. Some talk, inter alia, of a track side fire at Waterloo. Pushed through them and onto an empty platform. We had just started to think that maybe we should have gone to Victoria after all, when a near empty train pulled in. We had waited less than five minutes as it turned out.

Disarray continued in that the usually well filled taxi rank outside Epsom station was empty, a consequence we learned of trains beyond Epsom being out of action and all the Epsom taxis having been taken by all the people who lived beyond Epsom, out in the country. Another wait of less than five minutes.

Home to turn out Bostridge again. Where, I had read beforehand, that the key transitions between the songs of the cycle were sometimes important, key transitions which could be disturbed by transposition, perhaps for a bass singer rather than a tenor - which might explain why Coote was not as good at 'Auf dem Wasser zu singen' as I had expected (see reference 4). Unfortunately, as I had thought that changing key just meant multiplying everything by 1.234 or whatever, leaving the relationships between the transposed notes unchanged, my music theory is clearly not good enough to understand how this could be so. Maybe one day I will come across someone who can put me right.

PS: we could not manage snow for the illustration but we could manage a segment of the John Lewis Christmas monster display in Oxford Street. Said to be tied in with a whole raft of expensive advertising on television and elsewhere. Very expensive looking it was too.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/back-at-court.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/sonatas.html.

Reference 3: Schubert's Winter Journey - Ian Bostridge - 2015.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/trouser-roles.html.

Shrinking phone

I have just woken from a dream involving a building I used to know quite well, Government Offices, Great George Street, GOGGS to its friends. A GOGGS which had been refurbished in a way that one could no longer get from one part to another without going outside, an outside which had morphed into something between Edinburgh Castle, stuck up on its mound, and Parliament Street with its clutter of old buildings, or at least old facades. This last having been brought on by their appearance in a half watched episode of 'Morse' the evening before.

At some point I was on the relic & rubble cluttered slopes outside and came across a really interesting plant, a plant which I wanted to photograph for posterity, or perhaps for the blog. So out with the telephone and try to get down to business.

To discover that this particular sort of mobile phone shrank as its battery ran down, in this case to the point where it was about the size of one's thumbnail. All a bit awkward as things like the power switch did not shrink.

Not an important enough matter to wake me up, I just gave up and moved onto the next episode in the dream.

With thanks to Google for the illustration. Famous public house off snap to the right. Hardened bollards foreground. Such an important street that the image is only a few weeks old - see bottom right.

More law

The original idea of getting the book at reference 2 was to learn all about the high incidence of crime in the middle ages, that is to say the first half of the 14th century.

We do not get to learn much about the incidence of crime, partly because, in 1979 at least, no-one had much idea about how people there were in England or about their age structure, beyond a suspicion that with high mortality it was probably a young population with lots of young men of criminal age - with bulges of such often being responsible, even now, for bulges in the crime statistics.

But there is a great deal of documentary evidence in the form of pipe rolls maintained by the courts, tales of dirty deeds, their victims and perpetrators from, in this case, around seven hundred years ago, many of which have survived the various ravages of time. Evidence which includes all kinds of fascinating legal jargon, jargon which can, I dare say, be traced through to our own jargon and practises. Do students of law spend any time on such stuff? It would be a pity if they have so much other stuff to learn - perhaps about the mountains of regulations coming from both our own Houses of Parliament and the gang in Brussels - that there was no room for a bit of background. Just in case, I offer a few bits of said jargon.

Trespass. I had always thought of trespass in terms of being on someone's land without their permission. Trespassers will be prosecuted and all that. But it seems that in the olden days it was almost any offence not serious enough to count as a felony or treason. And given that the economy of the time was largely agricultural, and that agriculture meant land, a fair bit of this involved being on someone else's land.

Also excluded were misprisions of a felony or treason. With a misprision, it seems, being a failure to report something, in this case a felony or a treason, to the proper authorities.

I think that the Hanawalt hierarchy of larceny, burglary, robbery and homicide were all forms of felony. Larceny being simple theft, burglary involving breaking and entering, robbery involving violence against persons, or threats of same and homicides meaning murder of one sort of another. Which looks very like our own hierarchy. Maybe the form was that if the value of goods involved was low, the victim was un-important or the perpetrator was important, then the offence was either dismissed or treated as a trespass.

Then we had commissions of trailbaston. OED tells me that a trailbaston is a corruption of a French expression meaning somebody carrying a cudgel, or by extension anything else of that sort, something of a serious menace in the 14th century. A commission of trailbaston empowered someone to go after these people.

And commissions of oyer and terminer. A corruption of another French expression, this one meaning to hear and determine, a sort of paraphrase of the legal process of the time. Commissions of oyer and terminer were usually used to go after people involved in major disturbances, rebellions even. Nobles even, people who were usually exempted from due process.

Lastly we had juries and jurors. It seems that the form back then was that the jurors acted as private detectives, made their own assessment of a case before it was heard by a justice and with the hearing consisting largely of their testimony to the justice. Plus, they were much more apt to come down hard on strangers than on people from their own towns and villages, the friends and relatives of whom they would want to continue to live with. Not how we do things now at all.

All great fun.

PS: it is a pity now that I did not get a senior official of what is now the National Archives to show me a real live pipe roll when I had the chance. I made do with some tallies instead; Treasury flavoured and interesting enough, but not as interesting as a pipe roll.

Reference 1: Crime and conflict in English communities 1300-1348 - Barbara Hanawalt - 1979.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/felony.html.

Fish soup

Yesterday being a day for fish soup, made from left overs, rather than the more elaborate proceeding noticed at reference 1. Not the first time that I have used fish in this way, but I think that this is the first time that I have noticed it.

BH got four slices of salmon, described as lightly smoked, in the same format as that illustrated left. On special from the Leatherhead Tesco's, so very reasonable. We took two and a half of them fried in a little oil for lunch. Rather good, with the smoking (or whatever passes for smoking at Tesco's) having left the flesh of the fish firm, how I like it.

This left us with some boiled potatoes, parsnips, carrots and cauliflower and one and a half slices of cooked salmon.

So, somewhat later, chop the potatoes and parsnips into roughly centimetre cubes. Chop the carrots finely, so as to bring colour but not lumps to the mix. Add, together with 2oz of red lentils to 1.5l of water, bring to the boil and simmer for about 45 minutes. Chop the cauliflower into roughly centimetre cubes and add that. Remove grey matter (peripheral nervous system, aka lateral line), white matter (fat) and skin from the fish, crumble the pink remainder and add that. Simmer the whole for a further five minutes and serve with brown bread.

Just the ticket on a cold winter evening.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/fish-soup.html.

Detailing

Figure 1

Following the last post, I thought a few architectural thoughts about Hall No.1 at Kings Place were in order. Figure 1 above, turned up by Bing, gives some idea of the construction, if not the atmosphere of the place under concert lighting.

The dominant motif from where I was sitting was that of the rows of pillars, left, front and right, arranged so as to look as if they are free standing against a dark space. I was not sure whether they were free standing or not, being reasonably sure that cunning lighting could give that illusion. A rather good idea, but the effect was rather spoiled by the chunkiness of the pillars.

A chunkiness which was accentuated by the use of distance between two successive pillars, measured from left hand edge of one to the left hand edge of the next, or put another way the interval plus one pillar width, as the unit of length from which the design as a whole was put together. I associate to the old difficulty with telegraph poles, where the number of poles is one plus the number of spaces between poles, an endless source of confusion and error in computer programs.

Figure 2

A unit of length which was used for the panels beneath the pillars, which, inter alia, gave the unfortunate effect of the pillars sitting on the gaps between two successive panels. This might be clearer in Figure 2 than Figure 1.

The ceiling, which was lightly coffered with square panels of the same size, worked rather better.

The sound might have been good but while the hall was not as bad to look at as it had seemed on the first occasion, it was still not good. It would be interesting to know whether it was done on a tight budget or whether there was money to burn on this prestige project

In any event, it seemed to me that this was a hall which had been designed about some good ideas, but by someone who either disdained detailing in favour of a modern look - or did not know how to do it. A lack of basic training in architects' school. Perhaps all wannabee architects should be made to study London's County Hall, where the exterior stone detailing is generally very good and gave me much pleasure through the years when I walked past it, twice every day.

So, for example, the panels underneath the pillars could have been done much better, perhaps by allowing the pillars to run down between successive panels, rather than having them sitting on the crack. Perhaps a little coffering of the panels, to pick up that of the ceiling. While stopped bevels running most of the length of the two outside edges of the pillars would have taken away their unsightly chunkiness, and provided some relief from the brown - of which there was, as things stand, rather too much. And something better could have been done at the corners, something better than sticking rigidly to the unit of length.

A hall which might have been.

PS: Bogger, for some reason, has taken to varying the font within a post without my knowingly asking it to. The only remedy I can think of is to pass the offending test through Notepad to strip off the formatting. Tiresome. No doubt some erring paragraphs will slip through my editorial net.

Reference 1: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/.

Suite

Following the concert noticed at reference 1, another go at the cello suites last week at Kings Place.

Pieter Wispelwey giving us suites 1 and 3, plus a suite from Britten and a sonata from Ligeti.

Bad start in that we had a new-to-me sort of carriage to take me from Epsom, arranged with heaters under all the seats, taking away what might otherwise have been room for one's feet.

But things got better when I found that the Pentonville Road exit from the Victoria Line at Kings Cross meant a lot less underground walking than last time.

I turned down the various bars on offer along York Way, and settled for the bar in the Rotunda, in Kings Place itself. Another of those central London bars which manages to provide good service when it is busy. Furthermore, it seemed quite cheap for the location. And they gave you a fancy glass for your whisky - which seems to have become the norm in the better class of bar. Very few people were using cash, so my presenting the barman with a tenner slowed things down a bit.

Oddly, the central, multi-floor space outside the bar seemed rather cold, despite being smart, modern, reasonably well populated and decorated with inoffensive art. Maybe a bit too much like an office - which is, of course, what a lot of it was.

On into the hall to be greeted by a much smarter cello stand than that which I noticed at reference 3. Given that this was a solo performance and there was no need to raise the sitting cello to the level of the standing violins and viola, one can only suppose that the floor manager thought that the cello looked better sitting on a little stand that sitting on the stage. The net result was that my eyes were about level with the holes and the sound from the middle of row F was very good indeed.

But also close enough for there to be various odd noises, in addition to those arising from bowing or plucking the strings. Some were breathing. Some were the fingers of the left hand tapping the finger board. Some were the bow catching the case. But quite a lot I could not place at all and I wondered if catching the still moving string with the bow could sometimes produce a click on impact. Something else to ask a cellist if I ever get up close and personal with one.

Hall a little more than half full, rather less full that it had been for Clein and with some leaving at half time. Why, I know not. But quite a lot of young people, quite a lot of working age. So a lot younger that most of our musical events.

There was a Chinese couple a little in front of me and the lady of the couple would have taken the prize for the most naked lady of the evening, with the back of her dress consisting of little more than narrow straps, but she had to be disqualified by being one of the leavers.

The Britten and the Ligeti were interesting, with some good passages, including echoes of the Bach, but not really my thing, despite Wispelwey giving us a musical introduction to the Britten so we knew what to expect. Maybe they are musicians' pieces, better suited to the trained ear. But the Bach was very good indeed, particularly No.3 - so much so that at exit one learned lady was talking about there perhaps being too much attack. But I liked it.

Bit of a wait on the way home, just missing a connection, so put in a visit, the first for a while, to the Halfway House at Earlsfield. Busy, but not packed around 2200 on a Friday evening.

Earlsfield station was remarkably clean and tidy, with all the free papers and other litter collected up. Very large half moon to the east, illuminated by the sun somewhere to its left, well below the horizon. (The papers have been talking about large moons, something to do with its orbit around the earth not being very circular). Then, for a few minutes I had an excellent position on the platform, but the best I could do was a couple of singles. Aeroplanes that is.

Lot of burbling from the guard over the intercom, more or less incomprehensible.

Next stop Jean-Guihen Queyras in June next year.

PS: checking this morning, I find I had heard Wispelwey before, about 5 years ago and noticed at reference 2. It looks as if I liked him at much on that occasion, rounded out, as it happens, by a first visit to the nearby Saint Bartholomew the Great.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/the-home-of-guardian.html.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Wispelwey.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/cello-stand.html.