Scholem

Just finished reading a fascinating memoir by one Gershom Scholem, a pick-me-up from the library at the Tooting Wetherspoon's. 150 pages or so of it. No idea how it came to be there, but, like the platform library at Raynes Park, the standard is a lot higher than one might expect.

Scholem came from a family of Berlin Jews, originally from Silesia. He was clearly a very able chap, pursuing both mathematical and Jewish studies at various German and Swiss universities, rather than going into the family printing business, and who emigrated to Palestine in 1923. Meeting along the way all kinds of people who were, or who became, eminent. And spending most of his subsequent career in the study of Jewish mysticism, picking up Yiddish, Hebrew and Arabic along the way. And I dare say other languages.

I did not give him more than a quick read, but I was struck by the fervour with which a lot of European Jews studied their roots, a reaction in some cases from the enthusiastic assimilation pursued by others in the face of a lot of institutional hostility. I associated to the fervour with which, at roughly the same time, a lot of Irish studied their Gaelic roots. Or, more recently, the fervour with which the Welsh and the Scots have dug up their Gaelic roots. A Gaelic fervour which probably had little if any of the intellectual firepower which European Jews brought to their quest.

While I can see the pull of a continuing tradition which is more than two thousand years' old, more than us Christians and a lot more than the Moslems, I don't think I could have devoted a good part of my adult life to it, even had I had any talent for languages. I think, if I had had to chose, I would have settled for mathematics.

This book was written in 1977, when Scholem was an old man. I was disappointed by his almost total lack of recognition of the problems which mass immigration into a land which was by no means empty was going to cause, mass immigration which started well before the horrors of the second world war.

But I was pleased to be able to turn out my FlexiMap of Berlin to help me along with all the Berlin street names. Bought in the margins of a very important conference, a gift from my manager during my time at the Home Office. Largely funded by Sun Microsystems, a then proud corporation, subsequently swallowed up by Oracle. Also to be found in the margins, was a rather strange bar in the vicinity of the Pankow underground station. Probably not a good place to have been in late at night.

PS: it seems that the aforesaid family printing business did very well out of printing some of the millions of forms needed to oil the bureaucratic wheels of the first world war. Scholem senior certainly spotted an opportunity there.

Corner evergreens

A little garden which has been planted in the corner of the front lawn of Ewell Castle School.

Not the sort of establishment which I approve of - being all for properly funded public education where the children all mix it in together - but the garden is, nevertheless, a small pleasure on the road running between West Ewell railway station and Ewell village. It looks rather well from the road, off snap to the right.

One of the school's most famous graduates is the late Oliver Reed, well known actor and boozer, who went on to host well oiled parties from his base in Leatherhead. I had thought that there was also a long suffering Danish wife, but Wikipedia tells me that while there was such a wife, a second wife, she was entirely English and that she met Reed when she was just sixteen. And their base was not Leatherhead, rather a place called Pinkhurst Farm near Dorking. A grade two listed building.

PS: later: it comes to me now that I had probably confused Oliver Reed with another well known boozer, George Best, who perhaps did sport a Danish wife in his home near Leatherhead. An which includes some of the richest people and some of the fanciest houses in the land, despite the London overspill moved there after the second world war.

McCarthy & Stone

McCarthy & Stone being a well known provider of accommodation for the older person, noticed here occasionally, for example at reference 1. McCarthy & Stone themselves being found at reference 2.

They crop up today for two reasons.

First, I have learned that Abbeyfield, another provider of accommodation for the older person, but a charitable provider rather than a for-profit provider, is moving away from their bedsit model to something much more like the apartment model of McCarthy & Stone. Which led me to wonder where Abbeyfield get their capital from. Do they get government funding of some sort? Do they raise money on the market like any other business? Could I lend them money on interest? I dare say that I could find out if I did more than skim their annual report, but as it is the best that I can do is 'with an agreed loan facility to drive further growth', which suggests that they are raising money on the market.

Nothing wrong with a certain amount of convergence and consolidation as the market matures.

Second, quite by chance, I notice from the bottom of some promotional material, that RHS Wisley are proud to be sponsored by McCarthy & Stone. Here one is led to wonder about the scale of the sponsorship; the sponsorship of a retirement visitor attraction by a retirement home provider. All very incestuous.

PS: I was pleased to read on the McCarthy & Stone website that Messrs McCarthy & Stone really exist, or at least they did back in 1963 when the company was founded. 'John McCarthy and Bill Stone enter into partnership in 1963 and the McCarthy & Stone story begins.  Early work focuses on building houses and bungalows for the open market'. They are not just names dreamt up by the marketing department of some large conglomerate seeking to push into the older person market. Although it is always possible that they will be swallowed up by some such conglomerate in due course, with their marketing department retaining the names and branding because they work. Don't mend what ain't broke.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/walmer.html.

Reference 2: https://www.mccarthyandstone.co.uk/. Note all the children running around on the front page. Don't want the places to feel too old!

Reference 3: https://www.abbeyfield.com/.

Escape with me!

I am now half way through my second reading of reference 3, a travel book by Osbert Sitwell, prompted by reference 1. A relic of the days when celebrities were able to fund their travels by writing books about them; unlike nowadays when celebrities are paid to tell us about their travels on trains on television. As if it could be said to be travelling when one is traipsing about with a camera team and support lorry.

A book with history in its own right, once the property of one William Valentine, lately chairman of University College, Dundee (the place noticed at reference 2), donated to the library there by his widow in 1972 and found it way to me August just past, via Better World Books Ltd for little more than the price of postage and packing. A nicely produced book from MacMillan, with the rather pretty endpapers being the reproduction of a fragment of the Empress Dowagers favourite wallpaper. This famous Empress having started out as Imperial Concubine Yi in 1852.

An interesting read, not least for its descriptions of Angkor Wat and the Forbidden City.

This particular page caught my fancy, with its description of our opium relations with the Chinese. First we fight two wars with them to make them take opium in return for all the tea that we took off them. All the tea in China. Then the missionaries get in on the act and want the British authorities to make the Chinese authorities to make the stuff illegal. Then all the British tourists to Chinese towns wanted to taken by their guides to the most picturesque opium den in town, a very important part of their grand tour. But if you click to enlarge you can read all about it for yourself.

PS: while reference 4, which came to me via the University of Bristol library and a charity shop, is about to receive honourable burial in the brick compost bin at the bottom of the garden, unread. No doubt M. Butor is a fine writer, famous even in French literary critical circles, but life is too short. The pile of unread books is too high. A book which came interestingly bound with thick cardboard covers (possibly by les éditions de minuit, possibly by the library on arrival there) and which came complete with a variety of interesting library stickers, including one which instructed the reader that the book was confined to the library.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/facades.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/puzzle.html.

Reference 3: Escape with me: an oriental sketch book - Osbert Sitwell - 1939.

Reference 4: Répertoire IV - Michel Butor - 1974.

Potholes

For once in a while, I did a Ewell Village circuit today, anti-clockwise, so starting on West Hill rather than Longmead Road.

Quite struck by the poor state of the roads from a cyclist's point of view, with plenty of potholes plenty big enough to give one a painful jolt, or worse, with the stretch from Ewell Village down to Pound Lane school being particularly bad.

So as far as this cyclist is concerned, the hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on the barely used cycle path from Malden Rushett to Epsom would have been much better spent patching up these potholes in the roads. But to be fair to the council, they were probably only responding to pressure from some middle aged and not very representative pressure group made up of greens, cyclists and eco-warriors. Probably the same people that inflict hornéd cows on Epsom Common.

All the real cyclists, the young lycra types, charging up and down Horton Lane, stick to the roads, as I generally do. And I might add that while I have never worn lycra, I do now wear a helmet.

No skin in the game

I was thinking this morning that it was all very well for our Foreign Secretary to make careless bets on the future of our country and to take risks, because he is rich. And if he were to be chucked out of politics, he could, in the short term at least, make a good living as a journalist. Nothing that Brexit might chuck at the rest of us is going to affect him all that much. And if push comes to shove, he can always skulk off to the Virgin Islands or some such place and live his time out in the tax-free sun.

But some of the rest of us, not so fortunate in money matters, will not be so lucky.

But then again, to have too much skin in the game might mean that one was not prepared to take risks at all. Which would not be too clever either. A bit like negotiating the price of the house one wants oneself, rather than getting a professional, an estate agent, to do it one's behalf.

Notwithstanding, I think we might have got a better result if our Secretary had had a bit more skin in this game.

Fancy spirits

Last Sunday to hear the new-to-us Novus String Quartet at the Wigmore Hall, a quartet founded at the Korean National University of the Arts, which presumably means the right Korea rather than the wrong one (which we have been bashing about or slagging off in one way or another for a very long time. No wonder they are a bit odd). But even the right one is a bit odd as the university web site is declared by MS Edge to be antique technology and suggests that I try that other antique, MS Internet Explorer, instead. See the rather slow reference 1.

Off to a tweeting start with a clutch of coal tits flapping about in the corkscrew willows (a domesticated version of the Chinese salix matsudana) on Clay Hill Green, a bird we only seem to see in the winter.

Trains behaving themselves this particular Sunday, with our riding in an unusually six coached train, complete with the name of the new franchise holder, but All-Bar-One in Regent Street was not, with service very poor. Reduced to going to Pret for BH's coffee fix. While I was reduced to watching as I don't trust the tea sold in such places.

Wigmore Hall full. We were expecting the quartet, being both young and far eastern to be sporting apples instead of scores, but in the event they turned out to be smartly turned out, in black, carrying regular scores.

Their three Haydn quartets (Op.17 No.6, Op.50 No.3 and Op.55 No.1) were all very good, just the thing for a Sunday morning. Music from a time when music was supposed to be reasonably complicated. but also pleasant and graceful. The words courtois and courtoisie come to mind. Possibly even funny. Before the heavies moved in with their rather heavier demands on both performers and audience. Before the moderns wanted to make instruments of the violin family do things for which they were not intended. Not that instruments have intentions, but I think the point is fair.

For a change, we thought to take lunch in the bar at the Langham Hotel, the place presently called the Artesian, for the well that the site or the building was once supposed to have had. This in preference to somewhere else in the same hotel which would have sold us a champagne tea for £65 a head or so and which might have been called the Palm Court. First, it was lunch time. Second, I am not that keen on that sort of a meal. Third, I might well have had to sit on a banquette rather than a chair. Need I go on?

But the Artesian was fine for lunch. It also sold a fine range of spirits and cocktails, including some which were very expensive indeed, although we did not partake on this occasion. Instead we had the background noise of the barman smashing up ice in a cocktail shaker. Quite a lot of smashing for what did not seem like a lot of takers for cocktails.

Classic romaine Caesar, aged parmesan, garlic croutons, Cajun ‘blackened’ chicken. This was nicely turned out and Cajun chicken was fine, nothing alarming or red sauce covered at all. For dessert I took biscuits - a nice touch that they can just give you a few biscuits - while BH had a flashily turned out dessert in a glass, a sort of layered affair involving various kinds of chocolate, white and brown. Very good apparently, probably getting on for 0.7 Mars Bar equivalents. All washed down with an entirely acceptable white wine - with another nice touch being that they pour it from the bottle at your table. My only mistake being that for the price of three small glasses, I might have done better to buy the whole bottle.

The sugar came with silver plated sugar tongs, and I dare say any butter would have come with a butter knife. Niceties which we have more or less abandoned here in Epsom, although they were still up and running in my childhood home.

Interestingly mixed clientele. Excellent service. All in all, well worth the extra one is paying over and above, for example, All-Bar-One.

Next stop the Waitrose food hall to buy a lump of Comté, the same brand as it happens, as one gets in Borough Market. I bought a fair sized lump, shrink wrapped, so we will see how it does for Christmas. Presently hanging in the roof of the garage, triple wrapped against the frost.

Three interesting buildings in the course of the visit. First, Chandos House, a relic of the past in Queen Anne Street, once the property of the Royal Society of Medicine, now a rather fancy looking B&B. Not particularly expensive, so maybe we will give it a try one day, rather than scuttling back to Vauxhall. No to be confused with Great Queen Street, home to quite a different sort of outfit. Second, the Harold de Walden estate office, also in Queen Anne Street, for all the world like the embassy for a small but proud country. Third, what was the Regent Street Poly in Regent Steet. I had never realised how grand it was inside. Very art deco. I remember it from the days of student unrest, back in the late 1960's, when shabby looking people with long hair used to hang about outside with fags on. Not sure if I ever went inside.

As it turned out, folding umbies was just the right thing for the modest amount of rain about.

Back to Vauxhall just in time to catch the 1506, so home at a respectable hour. Taxis had been down to two on the way out, but the line had been stocked up again by the time that we got back.

PS: reference 4 suggests that there is only one brand of Comté, in something of the same way as there is only one brand of Lincolnshire Poacher, my usual tipple. Maybe next time I am in Borough I will ask one of the young foreigns selling the stuff. From which I associate to the factlet that foreign is much the same word as the French word for someone who makes his or her living from working the fairs. See reference 5.

Reference 1: http://www.karts.ac.kr/index_karts.jsp.

Reference 2: http://www.chandoshouse.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://www.hdwe.co.uk/.

Reference 4: http://www.comtecheese.co.uk/.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/following-precedent-set-back-in-autumn.html.

Reference 6: http://www.langhamhotels.com/en/the-langham/london.

Reference 7: http://www.artesian-bar.co.uk/.