Piggy bank machines

The piggy bank, actually a large cardboard tube shaped and decorated like a tin of Newcastle Brown, was full it was time to visit one of the coin counting machines operated by HSBC to turn the coin into money - the visit to HSBC being necessary because of what I took to be the greed of Sainsbury's in charging 7% for the same service. See reference 1 - although I am not yet convinced that it was really as long ago as 2009 that I last had need.

I tried to phone HSBC to find if there was a more convenient one than that at Kingston, to find that no-one at HSBC would talk to me unless I supplied my telephone security number, something which, by definition is kept securely and not about my person. However, I persisted, and eventually I found an HSBC number which would answer without one, and the helpful young man, once he understood the question, was able to tell me that there were coin counters in neither Clerkenwell nor Wimbledon. He then went away to consult and came back to tell me that there was one in Fleet Street.

So off to Waterloo where I was able to take a Bullingdon from the first position of the first stand on the ramp, that is to say the position closest to York Road and to pedal off to Bouverie Street, Temple. On the way clocking one traffic violation by a city gent on a folding bike who should have known better, and sundry others by couriers, of whom there seemed to be a lot this day. Into HSBC by the bottom of New Fetter Lane where the young lady who greeted me took a few seconds to compute 'piggy bank machine', but she did get there, furthermore to explain that these were old machines, slowly going out of service, not to be replaced. The Fleet Street one was the only one for miles around and she had visitors from all over the place coming to use it. Use them or lose them! So off I went and had counted maybe £40 worth of coin, when it gave up amidst much whirring and popping. Very Professor Branestawm. Another greeter promised that the bag would be emptied - a full bag being the problem - in minutes and persuaded me to wait, I having computed while he was talking that coming back later would be a good deal more bother. So I waited and after a short wait was able to see off the balancing £30 - with the whole being credited to my account before close of play that same day. But waiting, it did occur to me that having machines of this sort involved more bother than I had realised and that perhaps Sainsbury's were not being that unreasonable. But then it also occurred that Sainsbury's probably handle more cash than HSBC, so cash handling was not exactly a special item for them. While HSBC offer counting as a free service to their customers. The greeter and I then started to ponder on the question of what small shops do, small shops which are large enough for counting into bags by hand to be a pain but small enough not to be able to afford a machine.

And so out and onto my second leg from Bouverie Street to Roscoe Street, St. Luke's, where I found the market café was more crowded than I had ever found it. Bacon sandwich on crusty up to its usual standard but the tea was off and I was reduced to water. I suppose the special machine was on the blink and they were too busy to bother with a kettle or a saucepan.

A change for the worse at St. Luke's where they reverted to the custom of doing the chat show part of the operation up front, rather than into the privacy of their microphone. We also got the pianist in a mercifully short conversation with his hostess at half way, in part of which he explained that he was making a protest against the fashion of playing everything from memory, which he claimed that Mozart would have thought silly. Also that he had seen plenty of performances where the pianist was clearly uncomfortable without a score and was making mistakes in consequence. He got a bit stroppy about it all, but ended sensibly enough saying that pianists should do what they were comfortable with. Which in his case was a score, although I got the impression that it was more by way of a prop than as something to be read.

The programme was the sort of piano music that I usually avoid, being, to my mind, more virtuoso than music, but in the event I rather liked it, despite the Liszt being done (by Ashley Wass, rather older than his picture above) in a rather loud and thumpy manner. I liked my rehearsal recording by Lazar Berman better.

Past the LSO removal vans out back, to pick up the third and last Bullingdon of the day at the Finsbury Leisure Centre, from whence to Bankside Mix, on the way chickening out of sliding up the left hand side of a large flat bed, not very full of rebars for one of the many building sites in the vicinity. Mostly rather short rebars they were too, and not long cut to judge by the shininess of the cuts. It was also rather wet and I was glad when I found a slot on a stand for Tate Modern by the Blue Fin building, that by the Globe being closed for maintenance.

And so into Tate Modern to inspect their new turbine hall installation, which had been advertised to me, I think, by the Metro or the Standard. Not a bad idea, but not properly worked through. It did not make good use of the space and the fact that you were not allowed among the pots rather detracted from proper appreciation.  But I did suspect the contractor - artist seems rather a strong word - to have shared a youth among scaffolding and scaffold boards. All very nostalgic.

Time for a snack afterwards so I paid my second visit ever (I think) to what turned out to be a branch of Gail's bakery. Cinnamon bun's were off, so I settled for a slice of foccacia, a cardamom bun and tea. Foccacia adequate, but probably had plenty of salt (if my foray into adult education was anything to go by, where we used lumps of organic sea salt on the stuff. See reference 3), something I am trying to have a bit of a down on. Food fad of the month, and have stuck to it long enough to find that bread without any salt tastes rather odd, rather like some of the bread we had in Florence a few years ago, and that a lot of food contains around 1% of the stuff. Bun adequate. Tea would not have disgraced an old style builders caff, complete with fog bank of fag smoke. So not a very healthy snack, but it got me going again after being rained on. One forgets how quickly one can get very wet on a bike in the absence of proper gear.

From there to inspect the handsome church of St. George the Martyr at Borough, and then onto to the tube to pay a visit to the Wetherspoons Library at Tooting. Serious discussion about how Lawrence Oliver or Ian Holm would have fared had they been shoved into real positions of power, rather than just pretending, and about how buffalo trace whisky came to be so called. See references 4 and 5. You also get traces in John Williams' 'Butcher's Crossing'. Rounded off the day by borrowing one trashy ladies' novel and one psychoanalytic tract about breast feeding, both from the forties of the last century. No aeroplanes at Earlsfield but made up for that failure with a rather silly conversation with a young couple whom I cornered on the train to Epsom.

PS: not impressed to read somewhere along the way that London Zoo, the headquarters of the once august London Zoological Society, is reduced to holding late night raves among the monkeys.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=croydon+franklin.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/grouper.html.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=lynching.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=tupelo.

Reference 5: http://www.nps.gov/natr/index.htm.