A wet and overcast day

On Thursday to Chancery Lane, as reported on 10th May.

Started off in the wet at Stoneleigh Station where I suspect the person of selling me my ticket of cheating me of £10, that is to say I got onto the platform with a sense that something was wrong and with £10 unaccounted for. I think what may have happened is that the ticket seller saw that I was proffering money without paying all that much attention, that he could take it, make some palaver and then ask for it again. If I challenged he could back down all smiles, if not he could trouser the tenner. And once I had walked away, I would need to be very sure or very bold to challenge him: I suspect that he correctly assessed me as being neither. Years ago, I used to suspect one of the barmen at TB of pulling the same trick, which annoyed me as I was a regular - but the only remedy is to pay more attention after one thinks that it has happened. Inevitably, attention lapses again after a while.

Good humour restored at Waterloo by a small boy taking very important charge of opening the carriage doors, dumping his slightly less important dummy and elephant in his push chair for the purpose. His reaction time to the light coming on to say the doors were activated was good.

Still raining a bit, so I thought walking to Chancery Lane was a better idea than riding, but it had more or less stopped by the time that I had finished there so picked up a Bullingdon at Breams Buildings to take me back to Concert Hall Approach 1. The new arrangement of the umbrella sling, making the umbrella hang the other way up on my back, heavy handle end down rather than up, worked well.

The idea had been to supplement our recent organ experiences with taking a gander at the display of organ flavoured constructions in the Clore Ballroom, but this turned out to have been dismantled and the only other offering in the Centre was a micro exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of photographic work by a lady Iraqi. She seemed to be particularly into aerial photography of deserts containing ruins or defence installations, but I was more amused by her video of ants crawling out of a nest hole to deposit grains of sand in a very tidy disc centred on said hole. After which Bullingdoned from Waterloo Bridge to Millbank House to take lunch in the members lounge at the Tate Britain. Less than £15 for warm flan salad, cake and glass of Austrian red, all good. Flan unusually so for a shop flan, usually hugely more inferior to the BH version.

Quick second peek at the stuff by Phyllida Barlow (see 14th April), which I thought had moved on a bit, not particularly for the better, but the attendant did not seem to understand my question on the matter. But I was fairly sure that she thought that what she was being paid to mind was just so much rubbish which white folks seemed to get excited about. A rather longer peek at Hunt's strayed sheep where I found that, at long last, I preferred the cleaned version to the reproduction made before cleaning hanging above me as I type.

For the third and last leg of the outing took a Bullingdon from Vauxhall Bridge to Grant Road West. The first item of interest was what appeared to be old pollard olive trees decorating the bottom of a building in Grosvenor Road, clearly visible in streetview at reference 51.485895, -0.133022. And the second was getting mixed up in the one way system coming out of Battersea Park which resulted in my having to pull up Latchmere Road onto Lavender Hill which, being a bigger hill than I am used to these days, made me puff a bit. Sufficiently out of breath that I missed the vacant slots on Grant Road Central and went onto to Grant Road West.

The third and fourth volumes of Osbert Sitwell's autobiography from the Raynes Park free library were a late bonus, even if the cheap book club reprint is a bit hard on elderly eyes.

Home to be annoyed by a piece in one of the newspapers about how most of our meat is killed Halal these days so that supermarkets don't have to fuss about separate supplies for the religious. I got all hot and bothered about the suffering to animals caused thereby. Later it turned out that the Muslim religious have, on the whole, relaxed a bit and allowed that stunning is Halal. So most of our meat might be Halal but has also been humanely slaughtered, so there was no real need for me to have got hot and bothered. But then, the next day, I read a rather irritating piece in the Evening Standard about how the whole business was a way to have a pop at Muslims under animal rights cover. Irritated because, in my opinion, people are only free to exercise bizarre or obsolete beliefs to the extent that they do not interfere with others or contravene important local standards. There is an important issue at stake here.