For a change, started out by walking, to come across a small flock of chattering female students in the vicinity of one of the student blocks down Stamford Street. Struck by a beam of curiosity, we enquired what it might cost to stay in such a place to find that it was around £125 a term week, perhaps £4,000 the academic year. Half of what you would pay in Epsom for the two bedroom flat noticed at reference 1 and a fifth of what you would pay for one of the fancy student flats for the children of the rich noticed recently by the Evening Standard. I remember paying 5 guineas for a posh bed-sit during one of my undergraduate years - but how that compares with £125 now I do not have the energy this morning to check.
From where pushed onto St. Bride Street, where we explored the mysteries of hiring a Bullingdon with a credit card, rather than with the white plastic key that I usually use. It turned out to be a right performance, with much clicking through of terms and conditions, but we got there in the end with a receipt containing a short code made up of 1's, 2's and 3's which we found one could enter into the post of one's choice to extract the Bullingdon locked therein. I had never noticed the three little buttons put there for the purpose before. Cycled across the top of what is left of Smithfield Market to return our Bullingdons to the stand at Roscoe Street, from where it was but a short step to the Market Restaurant for our bacon sandwiches. A bonus was that we had time afterwards to visit the interesting charity shop nearby, only to find that the biblical west Africans had been replaced by a secular eastern European, but I did manage to find a more or less new Franzen which I did not want to read, but which I did want to present to someone else for their opinion. I wonder whether the original owner was also the owner of the one at reference 2.
Into St. Luke's where we found that Ms. Clein had chosen a far more suitable dress for this occasion. And on the whole I found that the arrangement chosen for the variations also worked very well. There were only two or three out of the 30 odd variations which I thought failed the transcription and I was not sure about the pizzicato variation. Which was odd as, thinking for oneself, one might have thought that a work for the harpsicord, a plucking instrument, would not work for a bunch of bowed instruments. A plucked note is not the same thing at all as a sustained note and one might have thought that this would have had compositional repercussions.
More generally, the work illustrates the subordinacity of music theory, by which I mean that one can get on perfectly well with the work without having a clue about the theory. However, looking at the splendidly illustrated wikipedia article this morning, I hope I find time to take on the theory found there, as I expect any future outing to be greatly enhanced thereby.
From cabbages and turnips (the name of one of the songs worked into one of the variations), we moved onto even more exotic vegetables to be had from the still thriving indoor market at Tooting Broadway (the indoor markets of both Epsom and Exeter being long gone), emerging with supplies of plantains, okra and yam, together with instructions for cooking them donated by various people loitering around the chosen stall. I learned that plantains are not the same as green bananas. I have found that okra tastes rather like courgettes. And yams are yet to come, with some of the chunk that I bought having been incorporated into today's beef stew.
I suppose that the huge yam roots must have come from a correspondingly huge plant with the loiterers having suggested something perhaps like a runner bean plant or perhaps like a pumpkin plant. Next stop wikipedia.
Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/no-let.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/jonathan-franzen.html.
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