So off to Vauxhall, where not for the first time, I was able to view the stainless steel canopy from below, from where it looked rather good. From some angles it looks a bit odd & ugly and one thinks of waste of money, but from others the composition works well.
From there by bus to Victoria, from which we spotted the missing chimney at Battersea Power station. Google tells me this morning that all four chimneys were badly corroded by the bad things in the stuff which used to go up them and that all four will be taken down and rebuilt. All of which strikes me as a colossal waste of money. OK, so they they have made a fine space out of the Bankside Turbine Hall, but are we reduced to recycling turbine halls to make decent public spaces? In this particular case, the artist's impression of the resulting interior looks just like just another shopping mall. Was it really worth all that heritage angst and expense? All being done from the pocket of a Malaysian, who, speculating, is quite possibly a Muslim and quite possibly rich on the proceeds of palm oil. So Battersea Power Station is en-route to becoming a monument to halal margarine.
Got to the rather ponderous & pompous Doric flavoured entrance to the Queen's Gallery, to be greeted by the rather pleasantly amateurish palace servants who man the place. On in to admire the entrance hall (illustrated) which I had not really taken in on previous visits. A cunning transition from the severe Doric of the entrance to the Wigmore Hall lush of the interior, with the large mahagony doors at the palace being particularly Wigmorish.
I was interested by the Egyptian habit of having short square sectioned columns added on top of their nicely carved vegetable capitals on top of round sectioned columns. Their way of making the transition from the round columns which one wants at ground level, where square would be rather severe, to the square sectioned and square arranged roof beams. Gothic does everything with points rather than squares, so the issues are rather different, but perhaps a visit to St. Paul's is indicated to see how things are done there. And while arches in the mosques in the exhibition had moved from the Egyptian & Greek flat to Roman round, I did come across one old pointed arch. Perhaps the crusaders managed a few points before they were chucked out.
I noticed that the photographs of buildings and townscapes worked much better than the landscapes. These last involved slabs of half tones which did not come across very well. Buildings with lots of edges, angles and corners came across much better. No doubt there is some techy reason why this was.
I also noticed that the Muslims were quite fond of building their mosques out of what had been Christian churches. A bit like the Aztec habit of smashing up your enemies' shrines on top of their pyramids and replacing them with your own. A visible and permanent reminder of conquest. Keeps the conquered in their place.
And I was amused by the picture of an emperor in India being weighed for charity. That is to say he sat in a scale pan, and a balancing amount of gold was put in the other. The gold was then distributed to the poor or whatever. Exercise repeated with silver, then tin and so on. Perhaps we ought to institute such a custom here, with the Queen and the PM taking alternate years.
A good lunch at the nearby 'Pronto a Mangià', a tourist place but rather good. Very pleasant and possibly real Italian waitresses. A Spaghetti Bolognese the like of which I have not had since I took lunch in the staff canteen at the Savoy Hotel, maybe forty five years ago. Both spaghetti and sauce light and dry, a lightness and dryness which I have never managed to replicate at home and which I only rarely come across elsewhere.
Followed up by a rare visit to Rippon Cheese, to find that it was still there, although the people I knew had hired a new young manager and were taking something of a back seat. No longer visible. No emmenthal to be had, but they did do what turned out to be a very nice young Comté. The new young manager started out by pretending that he had never heard of the Comté man at Borough Market, but gradually softened, to the point where I wondered whether that was where he got his from. That being as it may be, his shop certainly had a very fine range of cheese.
Final purchase of the day was a boxed set of some television series about two policemen from the Netherlands. A sort of low countries Morse. I was betting on there being subtitles and lost, so we shall have to see how we get on without. Ten CDs to get through (so 50p each), series 1 to 4, Grijpstra & De Gier rather than Morse & Lewis or Starsky & Hutch.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/old-chablis-old-pix.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment