Stable block (2)

I noticed the East Street stable block at reference 1.

I now notice that the target of the refurbishment is now a day nursery, which last seem to be sprouting up all over Epsom.

For the greater convenience of both team members and customers, the back garden has been flattened for a car park and what I thought was a stable block has been knocked through into a gate, which rather spoils its formerly quaint appearance. (And does away with what looked like the shiny new, tropical rain forest sourced door of the previous illustration). I wonder if the heritage people said that the thing had to be preserved in some form or another, and this was the form they finally compromised on? Would it have been better simply to have removed it?

I also now wonder whether it was a stable block at all, rather a bit of kitsch from the very beginning. Scarcely big enough for a pony and trap, never mind a horse and cart. Did the pony live inside with the trap parked out front to impress the neighbours?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/stable-block.html.

Respect

Epsom saw a large traveller funeral today and as luck would have it the cortège was making its way over West Hill into Epsom town centre just as I got there.

Pride of place was given to a glass sided hearse drawn by a team of four handsome greys, with white plumes. A passer by counted between 15 and 20 Mercedes limousines, big black jobs, and I counted 10 or more wreath & flower filled pick-ups and small lorries, including a floral horse. Plus a trotting buggy and a small four wheeled cart drawn by a small but shaggy horse. These last, again, being full of wreaths & flowers.

All very impressive although most of the civilians standing around wondered where the money to pay for it all came from.

With some of the pick-ups advertising same, I wondered whether drive & garden work in the area was at a standstill for the day. I also wondered at the oddness of choosing to spend this huge amount of money on a funeral while at the same time preferring to live in a caravan on some more or less dodgy site on the wrong side of the tracks, rather than in the comfort of a house.

I thought it would perhaps not be showing respect to take a picture. Plus the telephone, while taking excellent pictures, takes a while to load the camera up, so a possibly discrete moment passed me by.

The Mikado visits Leatherhead

Just about two years after our visit to a very expensive Mikado at the London Coliseum (see reference 1), we went last Friday to the Thorndyke at Leatherhead to see the Godalming Operatic Society do it, an outfit which has done it roughly every ten years since 1930. They look to be a similar outfit to the Gosport Amateur Operatic Society with which our late naval aunt and uncle were once much involved - and the book of which can be obtained from one W. Delicate.

We have also, in the meantime, prompted I think by an article in the NYRB, taken in the 1999 film about the making of the Mikado called 'Topsy-Turvy', which we thought rather good and which, oddly, I do not appear to have noticed here. Inter alia, T. Spall very good as the Mikado. Another case, perhaps, of a show about a show being better than the show itself.

This new version had the merit, unlike the London version, of being done in proper Japanese flavoured costume, with the only bit which irritated me being the joke wooden chopper wielded at one point by the Lord High Executioner. The long sword used in 1948 and illustrated in the programme looked much better. But on this occasion, by way of compensation, we had one member of the cast being a fluent speaker of Japanese and sporting a Japanese wife.

Sundry contemporary & local references had been plugged into the libretto at various places, presumably places designed for such.

Theatre operation seemed a little amateurish, perhaps reflecting the difficulty the place has staying open at all. A pity as it is rather a good theatre (complete with so very sixties shuttered concrete) now they have proper seats; a theatre where we once saw Sir Peter Hall no less apologising for his rendering of Hamlet, one of the first performances before the show set off on tour or off to London or something. A version which I think included Hamlet in the buff at one point. So given that Leatherhead regularly features in posh lists as containing one of the highest densities of very posh people in the country, despite the London overspill estates, where have all the punters gone?

But, theatre aside, this amateur version of the Mikdado compared well with what I remember of the professional version. Perhaps not quite as slick, but I think it worked better for me being in a smaller theatre. And on this occasion, the show did not seem to show its age as much as it did two years ago. Maybe we will take in a third version should one appear - although we have rather been put off the forthcoming 'Pirates of Penzance' by the prices being asked by the Coliseum; we must have been feeling richer two years ago.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/nanki-poo.html.

River cobblers

The label illustrated was lurking in the kitchen this morning and caught my eye. What a load of old cobblers I thought. The clowns of food packaging - the people who bring us that ever so healthy olive spread (aka margarine) which is actually made mainly of a mixture of rape seed oil and palm oil - are at it again. But why on earth are they banging on about rivers when the white fish that we eat all comes from the sea?

Closer inspection revealed, that having more or less done in the once plentiful stocks of white fish in and around our own islands, we are reduced to importing farmed white fish from Vietnam, from approximately the other side of the globe, presumably from somewhere in the Mekong river basin. It does claim to have been responsibly farmed, so hopefully not doing any more damage to Vietnam than the release of all kinds of interesting waste products from fish farming into their waters - my being reminded of some eco-rant about how fish farming in warm climates can have interesting side effects.

And the Vietnamese get rich, or at least less poor, on the back of our inability to look after our own. One more dent in our presently dreadful balance of payments - and with the possible result that some Vietnamese tycoon will one day wind up owning both the Parthenon and Windsor Castle.

The fish in question is now part of the kedgeree destined for our lunch. Not much like the sub-continental original which seems to have been pulse & rice rather than fish & rice.

Cortana

A few weeks ago, I read about an interesting new offering from Microsoft called Hololens, an offering which enables you to interact with holograms which have been projected into the space around you, wherever that might be. See reference 1. In the margins it was explained that all this would come with Windows 10 which would also come with someone called Cortana, the Microsoft answer to Apple's Siri.

I can now report that Cortana has mysteriously arrived on my telephone. I have given permission for her to poke around in my telephonic affairs, told her about my favourite food & my favourite pastimes and we now await developments.

To get a taster I asked her to 'give me pi to 20 decimal places' and she generated a Bing query which gave me a site offering a million decimal places. I then asked 'do you come for free' and she got into a bit of a muddle. But there may have been method in her madness as she could leverage my response to the various interesting web sites that she did came up with. I then wondered, given that the PC I am typing on now is plugged into my Microsoft account, whether she can also see my emails, this despite the fact that they are Google rather than Microsoft? Do the permissions which I rather unthinkingly gave her cover that sort of thing? Or do I have to do email on my telephone to let her in? This not being something that I do in the ordinary course of events, with telephone being for text, and not very many of those. Perhaps I should send some emails containing some obscure words - perhaps the names of obscure plants - and see if she starts offering advice about them.

Google clearly knows all about her and offers all  kind of rather sexist images in blue, apparently targeting the sort of people who like computer games full of muscly people charging around in militarised swimming costumes.

BH, not best pleased that I have acquired yet another digital distraction, asked if she could have a male version. Memory so slack these days that I couldn't even remember whether or not that had been an option when I first opened her up.

Reference 1: http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us.

Reference 2: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/how-to/wp8/cortana/meet-cortana.

Stop press

Stop press from Facebook: the latest thing for childrens' teas and childrens' parties.

I wonder what it looks like when the tub is half consumed, with plenty of traces & crumbs mixed in. Presumably not quite as pretty as when in virginal condition for an advertisement, which I imagine is what this picture is taken from.

Coped with the modern

Wet start to St. Luke's last week, so off to a soft start with a lift to the station. Entrained to Waterloo, with the only item of interest on the way being a cluster of six concrete trucks huddled down the hole at what used to be Sainsbury's Vauxhall. With six more waiting in the road outside. Clearly a major pour, although of what I could not be clear from the train.

I associated to the largest pours with which I was involved, things called pilecaps, a pilecap being a lump of cheap concrete, something called D one and a half (the one and a half for the maximum size of the aggregate used), a hundred cubic yards or more, sat on top of a cluster of piles, bored deep into the hard brown London clay. A large motorway bearing column was then erected on top of the pilecap. The column was A three quarters, the highest grade of concrete available on that job. A apart from A three eighths, only used for small, special jobs.

Pulled a Bullingdon off the ramp at Waterloo 2 and off to Roscoe Street to find that Stamford Street eastbound was closed so I was diverted round the cut (aka B300). A plus was learning that F. W. Evans, the owner or at least the ancestor of several cycle shops in the area had not arrived with the recent wave of two wheeled fashion, but had been operating in the area since at least 1920. This information being gleaned from a fading advertisement painted on a wall.

Uninterrupted bacon sandwich at the Market Restaurant, crowded, presumably because the rain was putting people off the otherwise fashionable street food outside.

A little early so I had time for a glass of white in the basement of St. Luke's. A substantial and nicely stemmed & shaped plastic glass, only marred by the mould marks not having been polished off. The manager told me that not only did they cost more than glass glasses, they also walked faster. It seems that the sort of people who attend evening functions upstairs think they will be good for barbecues and trouser them and he lost no less than twelve on one occasion. My glass was engraved both 'bbp' and 'ppb', but with reference 2 suggesting that the latter rather than the former was the correct formulation - although, oddly, they do not appear to sell the wine glasses in question.

Ms. Clein was back in her green dress and was squired for the occasion by Mahan Esfahani (from Teheran) on the harpsicord. Got on better than last week. Started off well with something modern from Hungary which, to my surprise, I rather liked. A cello sonata by Ligeti, a Transylvanian Hungarian of whom I had not previously heard and whose musical life, to judge by his entry in wikipedia, was something of an adventure. (The YouTube version at the top of the heap comes with one of those page turning scores which I rather like for home listening - but something one only rarely sees in public these days). Kurtág quite manageable being quite short - another György as it happens. Couperin good, complete with the assertion that the name is properly spoken with two syllables, rather than the three usually affected by English speakers. Bach sonatas very good. And having had a Bach violin remind me of a trumpet recently (see reference 1), this cello reminded me of an oboe, at least when playing long notes.

A large US businessman in the audience, complete with large baggage, saw fit to take a picture of the opening of the proceedings with his telephone, despite our having been asked to put such things away. He also left half way through. Presumably wanted to catch a bit of London culture before he caught his plane home. A good thought, pity about the manners.

Back via the Barbican Centre, still a fine building if a little tired around the edges. Bullingdon'd from Barbican Centre to Waterloo Station 3.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-leather-thongs-which-hold-toggles.html. Also an aperçu into the way blogger does things. I must have put the title onto this post after it was first posted, so blogger identified the post by the first few words of the first line and did not bother to change when I got around to giving the post a title.

Reference 2: http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+ppb+drinking-glasses.