Started off by taking a snack at the Madeira Café at Vauxhall, where we took bacon sandwiches and tea. Useful place, both serving and selling all kinds of interesting things. Sometimes you get strange-to-us Portuguese television.
Out to find Vauxhall Cross - this being the time of the evening rush hour - awash with bicycles and joggers, with a high proportion of the former in bright yellow hi-vis gear. Didn't see anyone on either two or four wheels behaving badly, but I can see that a four wheeler new to it all might find all the two wheelers a bit of a pain.
Over the bridge to inspect the hole which was Riverwalk House to be puzzled again why the builder's huts and offices have been put on top of a large chunk of temporary steel work, maybe 20 feet above pavement level. And the hole was clearly on the move with concrete still being poured past six o'clock. Would that be time and a half, as it was in my day?
Get to the Tate to find the newly refurbished front door shut and we are directed to the Manton door to the side, the door named for Sir Edwin Alfred Grenville Manton and which I got to like during the closure of the front door. It has its points, with, for example, some of the art work one comes across by this route being rather fun, for example the large time line on the wall opposite the cloakroom. We also noticed that the outer door was a very serious affair, sliding back into the walls when opened: it would take something very serious to smash its way through when it was shut. We, however, were able to walk in and soon found ourselves, along with between 100 and 200 other people, wandering about the area just inside the front door. An area which also contained strategically placed members of the ladies choir who were to perform for us, a choir of maybe 20 altogether. These few were warming up with carefully scripted humming. After a while there were more of them and they moved into a mixture of speech, chant and song - with a sample of the words illustrated. All a bit pretentious, but this did not really matter - any more than the silly subject matter of a lot of perfectly good paintings from the Renaissance. All in all it was rather good, a choir which could both sing and perform, this last in a reasonably restrained way; arm movements, gestures and a certain amount of walking and wandering about, in and out of the audience, rather than anything more energetic. The ladies had clearly been drilled in basic stagecraft and did not mind being stared at at close quarters - close enough to notice that all those who came near me had very nice nail jobs. They were wearing a sort of a loose fitting, low key uniform and made good use of the interesting space underneath the dome.
Audience rather young by the standards of the sort of thing that we more usually go to, with quite a lot of young ladies. Plus a young gent. wearing a very flamboyant waistcoat, the sort of thing that one might have expected to see on Oscar Wilde.
A new experience for us, but a good one, which may be repeated. It lasted for a little over an hour, after which back along the north embankment to admire all the illuminated buildings along the south one. A quick game of aeroplanes on the bridge, making a rare four. Train journey home only marred by a nearby gent. stuffing his face with a pasty. When I grew up eating in public was generally frowned on and even now, on the rare occasions that I do it, I do try to be discrete about it. Not all of the population at large are so scrupulous.
PS: I have learned in the course of this post that blog search discriminates between 'café' and 'cafe'. Not sure that Google proper does, or that one would want it to. One of these days I will get around to posting my important thoughts on this and related subjects, it being enough for the moment to observe that search is a fascinating topic, even when one knows little or nothing about the clever wheezes used to encode search requests.
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