Followed the successful visit to 'Oggies' of Newport at reference 1 with a visit to the 'Laughing Halibut' of Strutton Ground, a street once better known to me for its baker, the baker which provided my lunchtime bread - a small white bloomer - through my time at the nearby Home Office.
A bad start with three cheerful and talkative young ladies in the train, one of whom was explaining what rubbish gmaps was. Not for the first time, I was irritated by the casual dismissal of a fine product by someone who had probably never made anything in her life, and probably never would. I dare say it did not do what she wanted or expected it to do, but her dismissal was, nevertheless, irritating. Thinking about it this morning, I suppose that such dismissals are the price anyone must pay for putting themselves or their products - or their art - onto the market place. A price which still has to be paid, albeit at a much reduced rate it, if you are in the happy position that your position in the market place is so strong that you can restrict yourself to private clients and you don't actually need to descend, in person, to the market place at all.
The baker was still there, and still looked as if it sold the odd loaf for old times' sake.
The 'Laughing Halibut' turned out to be very good. A very pleasant & cheerful young waitress and with fish and chips better, if anything, than those at Oggies. With amusement thrown in in the form of a new term 'butterbread', which turned out to be a buttered white roll, rather than the two slices of factory white normal in such places. The roll was very good, although perhaps a little over-buttered, the sort of roll which was once widely available in fast food joints and restaurants. Now quite rare, even in otherwise quite decent restaurants.
Followed up with a visit to the next door Oxfam shop where I could have bought the collected works of Goethe, in a cheap German edition of ten volumes for £30, or the collected works of Schiller in a rather better edition. Who on earth is going to buy such stuff? How many people learn German at school to a standard to read such stuff for pleasure? At my secondary school I should think a dozen or so took it to A-level, out of the year group of around a hundred. A few clicks reveals that there were five takers for German A level in 2014 and that a school party has just come back from the annual exchange visit to Hamburg - but that is not to say that any of them had any interest in antique German poetry. So still no idea whether there are likely to be any takers. And even I, the previous week at St. Helens, had declined a rather battered, if dust jacketed copy of 'Ulysses' from the first reprint of the first unlimited edition, at £65.50.
On to Tooting to make an interesting discovery about the playing of Salieri in the play 'Amadeus', a play, incidentally, with only a very tenuous connection with the truth, with Salieri earning a long and respectful entry in wikipedia. First off the blocks was Paul Scofield with a towering performance, then we had David Suchet with a powerful performance, and then we had Nicolas Le Prevost who turned in a strong performance. But he trumped his two predecessors by reprising the role in a cameo in a much loved episode of 'Midsomer Murders' called 'Death of a Hollow Man'. Leaving one with the question of whether his stage outing paid more or less than his television outing.
Pleased to report that the aeroplanes were back in force at Earlsfield and flying well below the cloud cover. I scored several twos and with a little more time would have made a three. As it was I did not quite manage to track the left most aeroplanes down through the trees.
Home to ponder about whether it was time to retire our long serving copy of Chamber's Encyclopedia. I do still use it occasionally, but is it still worth its two or three feet of shelf space? Bearing in mind the fact that once we have finished with it, it will be waste paper. No-one else is going to want it.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/the-other-villa-2.html.
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