Saucepan hunt concluded

First stop on Monday was the lunchtime Wiggers to hear a young Norwegian, Christian Ihle Hadland, playing Mozart (K576) and Schubert (D959). A young man's playing, but none the worse for that. Both pieces fully up to expectations, with me even getting a bit emotional during the second. I wonder whether it counts for anything that the pianist was about the same age when he played it as Schubert was when he wrote it?

Outing only slightly marred by annoyances front and back. Front we had an oriental couple, middle aged and perhaps Japanese. The husband started by being more demonstrative with his wife than is usual on such occasions and then moved on to spend the first few minutes of the Schubert studying the Wigmore programme for the weeks ahead. For some reason I found the turn of each page rather irritating; I suppose he had caught my attention and I was not able to shut him out completely. At the end he closed his performance by energetic photography with his mobile phone. Back we had a chap who found it necessary before the off to converse loudly about matters musical, incidentally giving the people around the benefit of his views. Also rather irritating, but at least he stopped when the music started. Standing up at the end of the concert, the offending gent. was found to be very floridly dressed, by far the most florid chap in the audience.

Headed on exit up towards Marylebone High Street. Plenty of fancy & decent looking eateries about but we settled for fish and chips at the Golden Hind, partly because it was fairly full (I find now that it also has a large and enthusiastic web presence despite not having a site). Fish and chips pretty good although I think I might have done better to have the faster moving cod than the slower moving haddock, which had probably been in the hot cupboard for some minutes. Treacle pudding pretty good although they forgot to minimise the portion of custard, custard being for me a garnish rather than a sea.

Moved on to some excellent opportunities to spend some more, and passing up the butcher (lots of good looking beef) and fromagerie (name a bit pretentious but the cheese looked good. Rippon Cheese a more sensible name ), we settled for the kitchen shop called Divertimenti, northern branch (http://www.divertimenti.co.uk/). As luck would have it we were able to agree on new saucepans here within minutes, having failed to find anything that suited us both in either Kingston or Oxford Street. Exited, BH having flexed her plastic, took a quick look at Daunt Books, where I was disappointed in their not very interesting collection of books about Canada, perhaps not a top ten tourist destination, then on to the upstairs of a No. 2 bus to take a run through the centre of town, to the bus station at Vauxhall.

Very pleased with the Aga saucepans which seem to need less power than the very similar, if elderly, Prestige saucepans that they replaced. Presumably the bottoms of the latter have warped a little over time and more of the heat from the hot plates is blowing off into the kitchen rather than up into the grub. Maybe warping caused by the composite construction of the bottoms - a sort of metallic plywood - giving rise to all kinds of thermal stresses.