Lobster reprise

Back to Marylebone last week to try out the newly discovered Duke's Hall, having in the meantime discovered that Marylebone is named for St Mary on the burn, the burn in question being the Tyburn of execution fame.

Back at the starting line at Epsom Station, not a tweet in sight, despite there being a lot of tweeting. But we did get a very turgid message over the PA system about how the reduced track availability which had been caused by a broken down train at Balham earlier in the morning was knocking on through the rest of the morning and that all trains involving Victoria from south and south west London were apt to be delayed.

Having learned from a Bullingdon man at Waterloo that one usage had near doubled during the crow strike, taking it to the highest levels since records began and two there was a proper way to take a Bullingdon out of its stand, which might explain my wrist wrenching experiences over the months, I decided on the soft option, avoiding Hyde Park Corner, and using the route up Tottenham Court Road, contriving to get slightly lost in the vicinity of the British Museum, but making it from Waterloo Station 1 to Beaumont Street within the cheap, first half hour slot. No Market Café and no bacon sandwiches in the way of St. Luke's, so had to settle for a very natty bowl of couscous salad from the café in the Conran shop, taken right under where the red lobster had been just a few weeks before (see 20th January).

And so to the rather splendidly redecorated Duke's Hall, a bit smaller and I would think a bit older than the Wigmore Hall, including inter alia a lot of portraits and a splendid looking new organ, this last helped along by that famous RAM alumnus, one Sir Elton John. The lunch time concert was one of a series of freebies, well attended, and consisted of Mozart - Piano Quartet in G minor, K478, and Clarinet Quintet in A, K581 - given by the Eagle Trio and friends, all students at RAM (http://www.ram.ac.uk/). Very good it was too.

From there over the road to the parish church, another rather splendid place, although I did wonder what use the church got out of what must have been considerable costs and I don't think that you get a subsidy just because you own a listed building. A fine view from the porch up into Regent's Park and another fine organ inside, seemingly being used for a lesson by people from the other side of the road. There was also a memorial tablet to one Lord Teignmouth, a Persian scholar of modest origins, governor-general of India, first president of the British and Foreign Bible Society and, despite being  in the Irish peerage rather than the English peerage, there was a connection through his wife with the Teignmouth in Devon where BH went to school (when the line through Dawlish was up and running, which it was most of the time).

Home via Tooting where I learned that one of the many advantages of modern mobile phones is that they can do a decent job of displaying exotic scripts such as Persian, although I did not get as far as finding out whether support for same extended to using them for text messages. Bad game of aeroplanes at Earlsfield where the best I could manage was a couple of bad twos, despite a bright and clear, early evening sky.

Supper consisted of the lentils and rice featured on 7th February, and about which I have now logged a query with the customer service people at our local Waitrose. We shall see what, if anything, they come up with, but in the meantime I bought some more of their red lentils to show that there were no hard feelings in the matter. But no discount for my 'My Waitrose' card either.

PS: just found a new toy, possibly new with Windows 8, called 'character map', a much easier place to fetch accented letters from than doing a Google search for a suitable Wikipedia entry. The map looks to include at least some Arabic and Hebrew letters, letters which survive being copied here via Notepad, this last being my conduit for such. For example the Arabic 'ﯓ'. A surprise, as I thought the whole point of Notepad was that it stripped out anything other than the basic 256 member character set, useful for getting rid of unwanted formatting characters when moving stuff about, but which, while including the various odd characters used in western and northern Europe, does not include anything Asian or Oriental, and certainly not Persian (vide supra). Clearly my knowledge of such matters is getting a bit rusty.