Bad start in that something was wrong at Clapham Junction and I had to get a Victoria flavoured train, rather than the usual Waterloo flavoured one, but made it in the end, albeit rather later than I had intended or hoped. Picked up a Bullingdon at Grant Road East, without any difficulty on this occasion, and opted for the Wandsworth Road route into town which gave me the opportunity to be reminded about the flashy new paving in the immediate vicinity of the junction (see 20th August 2013). Rather well it looked too, although as with the Bullingdons, I continue to wonder about the cost justification.
Dropped the Bullingdon at Vauxhall Cross, picking up another at Albert Embankment, and on over Lambeth Bridge, to be rather irritated by a smartly turned out middle aged gent. cycling south across the bridge on the upstream pavement, despite there being perfectly good bicycle lanes on both sides of the road. He looked as if he might well have emerged from the nearby HQ of the security service and if you can't trust them to stick to the rules who can you trust?
Dropped this second Bullingdon at Millbank House to make my way into the exhibition put on by Phyllida Barlow, a descendant of Charles Darwin no less and slightly older than I am. It turns out that she was a pre-cursor of Dame Trace (see, for example, May 12th 2010 in the other place) in that she started making sculptures out of rubbish first. Rather better at it, I might say, than her more famous successor, making the sort of stuff out of junk timber that I might make myself, but I am not sure it ought to be given house room in a sculpture gallery, being nothing more than a junk timber version of doodling on paper, which I do do (see, for example, 6th April). But I chatted to a lady from Jamaica, who did not particularly like the stuff, but who had a far more imaginative response to it than I did, associating in a fascinating way to all the junk that gets thrown up on the beaches back home, in particular treasure chests.
Took a quick peek at Holman Hunt's strayed sheep, which still seems very bright compared to our reproduction behind the PC and which must have been made before the picture was cleaned, before catching the third Bullingdon to the Oval. Once again I managed to get off at the wrong stand, that is to say Kennington Cross, leaving me rather further to walk to the Oval than I had intended. But I did catch a very fine wisteria, west facing and in full flower across the front of a house in Lambeth Road. Not sure why this particular wisteria was so much earlier than those elsewhere; that in our own garden, for example, only just coming into bud. There was also a live OddBins at Kennington, one of what must be just a few survivors: I still miss the one I used to have on the way home from Epsom station, Waitrose not nearly so convenient and with neither Tesco nor Co-op being up to much.
On to the Tooting Wetherspoon's, where selecting the most expensive white wine in the house worked for me, with the resultant Sauv. Blanc being entirely acceptable. Started to speculate about which planets were in which house at the time of my birth (Libra), speculations which my interlocutor, another Libran, thought was a fairly crude way of poking fun at her, so she left. But it is true that the skies have been clear this spring and there are planets to be seen, even if I am not very good at sorting out which is which. Too busy trying to sort out the horns of the moon (see 8th April. Which makes me wonder how Pepys would have got on with a searchable diary, rather than a ciphered one).
Home via Earlsfield where I had time to admire the deep ruts worn in the road surface by passing buses and where I was able to score several of twos at the aeroplane game while waiting for the train home. One of the aeroplanes had four engines and seemed rather large, leading to further speculations about whether the interval between aeroplanes was in any way related to the number of engines. It seemed quite likely. I also decided that what I needed to up my game was a couple of poles on stands which I could use to mark the position at which aeroplanes came into view and went out of view. One could do it by mentally marking the right bits of tree, but with there being quite a lot of trees, that was too much for the wine washed brain. Poles would be easy enough to carry about - but what about the stands?
Back at Epsom I noticed that the field which had contained the horselet (search for horselet or see, for example, 2nd January 2013) also contained a small pond, or perhaps a large puddle. So all the fussing about water for the horselet may have been misplaced. We may even have made quite unwarranted remarks about the horse keeping arrangements of the travelling community. On the other hand, the small pond may have been the result of the abnormal amount of rain over the winter just past.
No comments:
Post a Comment