Started at the Costcutter in Epsom which used to be our Post Office and the back of which still in a Post Office - but with a queue which almost stretched back to the street. So I abandoned that one and settled for a proper holder for the new phone, which, now I have got used to it, is much better than the spectacles bag I had been been using.
From there to Hampton Court via Southwest Trains, clutching our two-for-one vouchers. Journey time rather longer than the car, but for about £8 rail fare we saved maybe £5 car parking and an £18.20 entry. Or perhaps £15.50 if we got a concession rate, which we might have done on appearance despite failing to ask for it or show any id. Plus we got to see Bridge Road which we might not have done had the car been parked in the Palace, which it would have been on a week day when the railway station sunday deal was not available.
First stop the Cumberland Gallery, which turned out not to be a small number of big rooms, as I had been expecting, rather a slightly larger number of small rooms, mostly heavily hung. There was some good stuff. Lots of red coats to make sure that you did not pinch any of it.
I notice here what I remember of it. A couple of Holbein portraits, one of them a rather tough looking palace-master. I forget his proper title, but he was called Sir Henry Guildford. A Rembrandt self-portrait. A rather good cartoon for a portrait of his mistress (Margaret Lemon, who was decorous enough but who appeared to be wearing not much more than a red sheet) by Van Dyck. A rather good cartoon for a landscape with female figures by Gainborough - properly Diana and Actaeon - which very much reminded me of Cézanne's paintings of similar subjects. A nice set of 12 Canalettos. These last were very cunningly glazed and so lit that one had a job to see the glass even when one was looking for it. Interested to see the way that Canaletto was able to give a good impression of something, perhaps the small figure of a gondolier, in a very small number of very small strokes. I got the impression that he had a sort of code, a symbol library as it were, symbols from which were used for most of the details. Water like this, faces like that and so on.
All in all, good to see. A good supplement to the Palace offering.
And so to one of the cafés for lunch, this one with a focus on pies. We took chicken pies with pease which was rather good, very suitable for the rather cold former (Tudor) kitchen in which we ate. I thought to go one better and took something called a breakfast loaf, which turned out to be a rather substantial affair with bacon, sausage and egg wrapped up in toast with some sort of filling, possibly egg based. A sort of savoury bread and butter pudding. Apart from perhaps being a pie too far, they would have done better to omit the sausage, rather too savoury for my palette.
Followed up with the chapel, where I was struck by the way a Stuart brown wood altar piece had been thrust into the Tudor chapel. Not bad, but one could see the joins. Nevertheless, as impressive as ever.
And we more or less finished up with the Great Hall, which must have been the Great Cold in Tudor times. How on earth did they heat such a big space with so many windows? Presumably the answer was that they didn't and all the furs one sees in the portraits were a necessity of life, not a luxury.Very struck by the elaborate ceiling, of which the illustration above gives some idea. I associated both to fractals and to the gothic fantasies of Peake and others. Fascinating thing, made the whole visit worthwhile, in itself alone.
Out via Fountain Court, where the grass in the corners of the grass court was looking very sorry for itself, more or less absent, but with the bare earth full of worm casts. It was not clear if the worms liked the grass free earth or whether the earth was grass free because the worms had eaten all the grass roots. But why just the corners?
The pudding trees outside the Court were looking very good in the cold winter light of an overcast afternoon. And I also discovered that one could buy a special pole for taking selfies, with a party of Japanese girls making vigorous use of one.
Back to the station via Bridge Road, to top up at both Lancelot's and the butcher. The latter was able to cut me out just the right amount of tenderloin to perk up our evening soup from a piece of loin. I was also pleased to find that his display was still mainly on old serving plates (the sort of thing you might now pick up on one of the fancy junk shops nearby) and the meat was still wrapped for sale in paper, rather than just dumped in a plastic. But there was a warning that the prices displayed only applied to everydayvalue meat and that meat from rare breeds would cost more, presumably a lot more. The lady in front on me was wondering whether a goose could be added to her already substantial sounding order for the following day.
Home to find that the queue in the Costcutter Post Office had died down so we were able to post our letters after all.
PS: I tried to find a better picture of the Great Hall ceiling on google, but those there seemed to suffer from the same problems of both colour and focus as mine. Perhaps getting the depth of focus needed for such a roof is a real problem.
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