Round loaf continued very like a malt loaf inside and tasted good, taken without butter. On closer inspection the coconut turnovers turned out to be made of a flap of white bread dough wrapped around a slightly crunchy brown goo involving sugar & coconut and then baked. The finished pastry was a like a rather dry Chelsea Bun with just a hint of ripe Bounty Bar (traditional variety). Rather good, and BH managed two of them in one sitting.
Cakes purchased, proceeded to reflect on whether an actor was a conduit in the smoking area of the Antelope - in the smoking area to escape the noise of the interior rather than to puff, although the place brought back memories of the various excellent puffs I have had there and I think I might have accepted a cigar if one had been offered. So perhaps it is just as well that it was not. Reflections on a conduit were prompted by Patrick White's 'The Eye of the Storm', a film version of which we saw recently at the Epsom Playhouse (audience of about three, minded by twice that number of attendants) and the kindle of which I am slowly reading. Film rather lush & dense, a little in the way of a Peter Greenaway film. On the kindle, an interesting read, but a writer who manages to impart a rather clammy and cold tone to everything he touches, to the world he portrays. I think my mother used to read him in the sixties of the last century but I doubt if I shall read much, although I will probably get to the end of the storm. Anyway, along the way he tells us a lot about actors and their craft and he observes that the business of an actor is to be a conduit between the play and audience. Not helpful to have a lot of personality as that is apt to block the pipe. An observation which reminds me of the saying that a good screen goddess needs to be a blank onto which each member of the audience can project whatever they want to see; actress as an empty vessel waiting to be filled. Not quite the same point, but perhaps a parallel point. What I came to was a compromise: the actor added value to the text by bringing it to life in his person, and so making the play accessible, or perhaps visible, incarnate - but the idea was to portray the person in the play, rather than himself. He should not wrap his personality around that of the person in the play to the point where this last becomes more or less invisible and the power & point of the play are lost. But it is legitimate for the actor to contribute a few crumbs to the feast. To add a few finishing touches.
Not quite the same for Catholic priests, in whose case the rite and the ceremony are all; the character and morals of the celebrant do not taint the rite, which is sufficient unto itself.
Onto Earlsfield Station where I was prompted to further musings. Having left Tooting which was throbbing with mainly black people and come through Earlsfield which was throbbing with mainly upwardly mobile white people, I climbed the long flight of stairs up to the southbound platform to find myself in another world. A parallel world floating in the dark above the streets of London. A sensation which I have had before, but not recently, although one does get something of the same sort when entering a large bus station in the middle of a busy town. For once, the shiny new Lumia camera did not do the scene justice; perhaps you need a real camera to cope with all the lights and with my shaking hands.
PS: one of the charity shops nearby had several copies of the 'Times Atlas of the World', at £7.50 a pop, nearly new by the look of them. Good value, but I thought that we did not need a fourth atlas at a time when we were supposed to be downsizing in the book department. This despite the superiority of a good atlas to Google Maps for many of the purposes for which one looks at a map. But I do wish that the producers of atlases would ease off on the Dorling Kindersley side of things; it is maps that I want to see, not an economics or a geography lesson.
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