Bad start to the day with Excel truncating my strings when moving them between worksheets and VB at something over 8,000 characters and I have still not got to the bottom of it. Then the train failed to stop at either Earlsfield or Vauxhall because of emergency but invisible engineering works while managing to pass through both and to stop at Clapham Junction. Not got to the bottom of that one either. On the other hand the journey was enlivened by a small boy of an age to be fascinated by trains (especially those deemed to be going backwards), cranes and diggers. Splendid supply of cranes around Vauxhall. He was also very hot on W-words, which must eventually have got rather tiring for his mother.
The first, southern stand failed to supply a Bullingdon but I was suited at the northern stand, designated Waterloo Bridge, South Bank. After one and a half traffic violations (the half being when I walked the Bullingdon round a right turn at a no right turn), made it to Roscoe Street and the Market Café in Whitecross Street, to find that actually it is a café no longer, having been redesignated as a restaurant. But bacon sandwich and eastern European service still fine.
And so into St. Luke's to hear the third cello suite (Bach), some preludes (Chopin) and a new-to-me cello sonata from Shostakovich. All very good. Clein turned out to be the sort of player who has a very expressive face when she plays - and very good she was too. I would only suggest that she needs to work on her dress and on how to move around in a long one. The concert was nicely introduced by the managing director of the LSO, one Kathryn McDowell, with her name explaining her pleasantly soft Irish accents and with the director of St. Luke's being reduced to a supporting role. Her turn, perhaps, this week. Lots of 'Kathryn McDowell's in Facebook, mostly in the US, but not, as far as I could see, this one, so we will not get to be friends.
I wondered how two rather expensive looking cigar butts happened to be in the flower bed outside the main door, never having seen cigar types there myself.
Refreshments from Wetherspoons with more service from eastern Europe (Slovakian branch), this time very slow, the barmaid still having trouble with her till after two months at it. Back to Roscoe Street to collect Bullingdon two and headed back to Waterloo, to find, as a change from large chunks of structural steel, some slag cement in a distinctive tanker run by Civil & Marine. Which appears to be something to do with Hanson, this last being a subsidiary of the Heidelberg Cement Group. A far cry from the days when Glenda Jackson used to do commercials for the then thrusting & important conglomerate called Hanson. The toast of the city, or so we were led to believe.
Another fine sky at Blackfriars, somewhat illustrated at reference 1.
Home to read in one of the free papers that someone important had had the temerity to suggest that a lot of bicycle accidents in London were down to the cyclists themselves. This despite, as far as I am concerned, being the obvious truth, was deemed to be awful. The awful brigade have clearly never watched cyclists at work in London, where a significant proportion of them have poor road manners and scant regard for other road users. Why is it that cyclists think they own the roads? What is it about the sort of people that cycle that makes so many of them bad mannered and arrogant? Not quite as bad as the nutters (probably mostly on benefits) who go on about fox hunting, but definite tendencies in that direction.
Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/fading-favourite.html.
PS: this Clein not to be confused with the Klein of the Bottle, someone I knew of many years before I knew of the Clein of the cello. A closed non-orientable surface of Euler characteristic 0 (Dodson and Parker 1997, p. 125) that has no inside or outside, originally described by Felix Klein (Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen 1999, p. 308). My own copy of this last dating from 1952, suggesting that I was more precocious than I actually was.
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