St. Luke's

Last Thursday saw the last lunch time concert of the Autumn series at St. Luke's. So picked up a Bullingdon from the stand at (51.50479,-0.113015) and headed off, via Blackfriars Bridge, for Clerkenwell - and as the sign into the Bullingdon Bike part of TFL is down for the first time ever, I have had to resort to latitude and longitude from Google Maps rather than using the proper TFL name for the stand. The coordinates given are confirmed in broad terms by Wikipedia to be those of London. Plus, it is common knowledge that Waterloo is just a touch to the west of the Greenwich Meridian.

Arrived in time both for bacon sandwich and to browse the DVDs in the charity shop just up the street, getting two of the latter for £2 each. Not particularly cheap, but then it looked like a good cause. Further entertained by an incident outside the nail buffing shop (http://www.hulanails.com/). A white van managed to drive over their advertising board which had been standing on the pavement, at which point two or three girls dressed up like cocktail waitresses dashed out of the shop and one of them grabbed the van and brought it back for questioning. One wondered whether more exotic services were on offer in addition to the nail buffing.

Onto the concert where we heard the Quatuor Ébène (with a very swish if not very easy to use web site at http://www.quatuorebene.com/) do a Mozart programme: Divertimentos K136 & K138 followed by the String Quartet in D minor, K421. Truly an excellent concert to wind up the season with.

Quick beverage at the Wetherspoon's, then Bullingdoned it back to Waterloo to pick up from Konditur & Cook a couple more of their fruit & almond tarts, to find that they also do their own stollen, just arrived from their HQ under the Gherkin. And I had thought that the Waterloo branch where I shop was the HQ. I was tempted, but eventually thought that I had better report back in case there were pre-existing stollen plans in Epsom. Maybe there were plans to pick up a near freebie from the Aldi (or perhaps Lidl) stand by the ice rink which they sometimes erect in the Christmas fair at the south eastern corner of Hyde Park.

Back to view one of the DVDs, 'Men of Honour', about the trials and torments of the first black master diver in the US Navy. A good film, although we thought that it was all laid on a bit thick. It was hard to believe that such racism could be so pervasive, that there would be so few vaguely decent whites. After all, not all whites came from the deep south, and even some of those might have had a bit of good in them. One also thought that if someone really went through what was shown, that someone was apt to end up a rather damaged person. Maybe also one would have to be rather unusual, if not odd, to stay such a course. But it was a good sign that the US could make a film like this about itself