Clein

Last week back to St. Luke's to hear a novelty, a piano-cello combination.

Bad start to the day with Excel truncating my strings when moving them between worksheets and VB at something over 8,000 characters and I have still not got to the bottom of it. Then the train failed to stop at either Earlsfield or Vauxhall because of emergency but invisible engineering works while managing to pass through both and to stop at Clapham Junction. Not got to the bottom of that one either. On the other hand the journey was enlivened by a small boy of an age to be fascinated by trains (especially those deemed to be going backwards), cranes and diggers. Splendid supply of cranes around Vauxhall. He was also very hot on W-words, which must eventually have got rather tiring for his mother.

The first, southern stand failed to supply a Bullingdon but I was suited at the northern stand, designated Waterloo Bridge, South Bank. After one and a half traffic violations (the half being when I walked the Bullingdon round a right turn at a no right turn), made it to Roscoe Street and the Market Café in Whitecross Street, to find that actually it is a café no longer, having been redesignated as a restaurant. But bacon sandwich and eastern European service still fine.

And so into St. Luke's to hear the third cello suite (Bach), some preludes (Chopin) and a new-to-me cello sonata from Shostakovich. All very good. Clein turned out to be the sort of player who has a very expressive face when she plays - and very good she was too. I would only suggest that she needs to work on her dress and on how to move around in a  long one. The concert was nicely introduced by the managing director of the LSO, one Kathryn McDowell, with her name explaining her pleasantly soft Irish accents and with the director of St. Luke's being reduced to a supporting role. Her turn, perhaps, this week. Lots of 'Kathryn McDowell's in Facebook, mostly in the US, but not, as far as I could see, this one, so we will not get to be friends.

I wondered how two rather expensive looking cigar butts happened to be in the flower bed outside the main door, never having seen cigar types there myself.

Refreshments from Wetherspoons with more service from eastern Europe (Slovakian branch), this time very slow, the barmaid still having trouble with her till after two months at it. Back to Roscoe Street to collect Bullingdon two and headed back to Waterloo, to find, as a change from large chunks of structural steel, some slag cement in a distinctive tanker run by Civil & Marine. Which appears to be something to do with Hanson, this last being a subsidiary of the Heidelberg Cement Group. A far cry from the days when Glenda Jackson used to do commercials for the then thrusting & important conglomerate called Hanson. The toast of the city, or so we were led to believe.

Another fine sky at Blackfriars, somewhat illustrated at reference 1.

Home to read in one of the free papers that someone important had had the temerity to suggest that a lot of bicycle accidents in London were down to the cyclists themselves. This despite, as far as I am concerned, being the obvious truth, was deemed to be awful. The awful brigade have clearly never watched cyclists at work in London, where a significant proportion of them have poor road manners and scant regard for other road users. Why is it that cyclists think they own the roads? What is it about the sort of people that cycle that makes so many of them bad mannered and arrogant? Not quite as bad as the nutters (probably mostly on benefits) who go on about fox hunting, but definite tendencies in that direction.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/fading-favourite.html.

PS: this Clein not to be confused with the Klein of the Bottle, someone I knew of many years before I knew of the Clein of the cello. A closed non-orientable surface of Euler characteristic 0 (Dodson and Parker 1997, p. 125) that has no inside or outside, originally described by Felix Klein (Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen 1999, p. 308). My own copy of this last dating from 1952, suggesting that I was more precocious than I actually was.

Tinned salmon soup

We have recently discovered this fine soup, more or less by accident.

Start by making part 1 of a chicken fricassée. The general idea is to gently boil a chicken, chopped into half a dozen pieces, in water, together with a selection of vegetables. Some people add herbs and spices. Other people add a chicken stock cube to make the chicken taste more chickenee. Best not to add milk or cream.

When the chicken is cooked, remove it from the saucepan. Liquidise the broth. If you were not making soup, you would now be ready to go onto part 2 of the fricassée.

As it is, we discard the chicken and concentrate on the two pints or so of broth. Peel about two pounds of potatoes and cut into chunks of about two cubic inches each. Boil them in fresh water for about 10 minutes. Then transfer to the broth, bring to heat and simmer for a further 10 minutes. Do not cook the potatoes from scratch in the broth, as this will either take a very long time, damage the flavour & texture of the broth or both.

While the broth and potato chunks are simmering, open a tin of salmon. It does not need to be a particularly posh tin of salmon, although if you are a touch squeamish about fiddling around with fish, the posher the better. Drain the water out of the tin and dump the fish out on a chopping board. Break it open, remove skin, surface fat, brown flesh from the lateral lines, bone and any other bits and pieces. Just leaving the pink stuff. Coarsely flake it with a fork and add to the soup. Simmer for a further couple of minutes and serve with fresh white bread (if available).

An alternative to tinned salmon is to use left over grilled salmon, or if you really want to splash out, buy some raw salmon, express. This last will need to be lightly poached before you will be able to flake it. But it all tastes much the same once it is in the soup.

Reheats quite well, bearing in the mind the capability of even cooked fish to go off.

PS: posh tinned salmon tends to look like a crosswise slice of salmon fitted into a tin. Less posh salmon is more like chip board with all kinds of bits and pieces, probably from more than one salmon, pressed together and so on into the tin. It also tends to be a much paler pink.

Old Chablis & old pix

It was a damp, mild day and the snow of the day before had nearly vanished. The cones and tape around the new trees at Epsom Station had finally been cleared away, with their place taken by a cherry picker which, it looked all too likely, would knock the odd branch off one. At which point a goods train rumbled through, pulling a load of the wagons you might put sand or ballast in, a sufficiently rare event that the ticket office clerk denied that I could have seen such a thing. He thought I must have mistaken it for one of those contraptions which cleans, or perhaps checks, the lines.

From there to admire a large picture advertising Scottish beef on the platform, which was all very well but which had far more fat on it than is easy to get from a butcher: all the rib beef I see is far too lean, which is a pity. A good blanket of fat does wonders for the texture of the lean and one does not have to eat it. Although I rather like the fat when it has gone crisp & brown and most of the actual fat has drained out of it.

Pulled a Bullingdon at Kennington Lane Rail Bridge, the Vauxhall Cross stand failing me, and pedalled up Vuaxhall Bridge Road to get well tangled up in Victoria Station, to finally park up in Cardinal Place. From there but a short walk to the Queen's gallery to see photographs from an expedition to the eastern Mediterranean in 1862 and a gold themed assembly from the royal collection.

The photographs, all or nearly all albumen prints of 9 inches by 11, and all or nearly all very good, mostly architectural, but a few of exotic guards laid on by the locals and a few of a not very impressive looking HRH the Prince of Wales. I was struck, I think for the first time by the nearby and more usual meaning of POW. I was also struck by a lot of the buildings being not that unlike western European buildings and not that strange at all. With, I suppose, Venice and Constantinople being bridges between the two.

You get a pleasing crispness with some old photographs, and with a lot of arty black and white photographs, that is lost with the move to colour.

The gold assembly was interesting, including, for example a coronation girdle which illustrated the old meaning of belt for girdle, nothing to do with ladies' foundation garments. In this particular case a sword belt for the sword of state. Also a picture which told of a custom whereby suitors for a young lady, in this particular case the Virgin Mary, carried light staves or wands, the losing suitors publicly breaking their staves when the winner was announced. Also a small picture by a chap called Duccio.

Through Green Park, where I was accosted by two young ladies who claimed to want direction to a tube station, to quite a decent café somewhere in St. James', perhaps in Duke of York Street. Small but select and serving a fine big beef roll, only slightly marred by their insisting on a side salad.

On to M&S at Green Park where I found that one could buy fresh coriander, but not sage, wet or dry (see reference 1). And so to Hedonism to check out their white wines. We found that there were tasting arrangements in the basement where, by purchase of a key card one could sample from a bank of maybe twenty wines. We coughed up £9 for which I got about a tablespoon of a very fine Chablis. Upstairs to inspect a bottle there, to find that it would cost around £150 and was from a chap called Ravenau, a chap whom we were told had a firm grip on all the better Chablis. We were also told that being an old Chablis meant that most of the acids had been burned off, thus accounting for it tasting of German wine. It seemed rather an expensive way to get the German taste, so I settled for a bottle of actual German taste, a gewürztraminer from the Alto Adige, a brand which I have had before. Plus, for old times sake, a very small bottle of very strong whisky from Blair Atholl, which came in what looked like a medicine bottle and which turned out to have a rather oily taste which I was not that keen on.

I wondered who bought the very large bottles of wine, holding maybe as much as ten gallons. They would have been quite heavy for one person to manage, so perhaps the footballers and oligarchs who buy such things also buy a special cradle or crane from which to pour it. Or do they hire a bevy of former Miss. Universes for the job? I think they come with muscles.

Wound up at the Running Horse a bit further up the street, which I am pleased to say still sells pork pies, now on a plate rather than a slab of slate.

After all the excitement, it was perhaps just as well that I was paced up the 65 (give or take) stairs at Vauxhall by a young lady. And I did not lose count on this occasion.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/fooderies.html.

Fading favourite

This building is on the southern approaches to Blackfriars Bridge, very striking as you come off the bridge from the north and to be found at gmaps 51.506689, -0.104134.

When I first came across it, maybe a couple of years ago, I was really taken with it. The architect seemed to have solved what I think is the difficult problem of attaching a big building to the ground in a satisfactory way, with a variation on the Millbank Tower solution.

Now I am not so sure. But it was still very striking in the late afternoon, bright winter light, earlier this week. There was also a magnificent sky, with lots of exciting clouds low to the south west, perhaps blowing in from the Atlantic. But the telephone is not very good at that sort of subject and I did not attempt it.

Possibly a bit let down by the surroundings - the Millbank Tower people having had a bit more land to play with and a bit more control over what happened around the bottom of their tower, which happenings included some substantial, if much lower, subsidiary buildings - with these last also being very much part of the Shard, to my mind another very successful tall building. At least from the point of view of looking at it.

A more careful look is needed, when they finally clear away all the hoardings from the ground floor.

No let?

The flats mentioned at reference 1 are still to let this morning; certainly one and perhaps two. At around £1,000 a month for an upstairs two bedroom flat, convenient to shops, public house and recreation ground - and just a ten minute walk to the well connected Epsom Station. Golf course with jungle attachment just up the other road. See http://hortonparkgolf.com/.

According to wikipedia the average wage in London in 2011 was around £500 a week, presumably before tax. No idea how good these figures are, beyond wikipedia being a respectable brand, but on such an wage, with a wife at home with two small children, these flats might not be the answer to your prayers.

Furthermore, while the central section, the one with boarding and pointy roof, serves to break up what would otherwise be a rather long block, is too high and too wide. Whoever did the design did not have much of an eye for such things. Perhaps it would have been better a little lower, a little narrower and slightly poking out from the face of the rest of the building. Perhaps a little decorative brick work, such as can be seen in at least one new build house in the neighbourhood and was normal in houses built around 100 years ago.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/what-is-going-on.html.

Its those trees at the station again

From time to time I comment on the authorities' attempts to get some trees planted in our newly refurbished station approach, this year seeing new trees being planted to replace the ones that no-one bothered to water in the hot summer of the year before last. And for an even earlier event see reference 1.

Then yesterday I noticed that the brick paving around the trees is already starting to break up. Perhaps all part and parcel of there presently being scaffolding up the new flats. Did someone accept the lowest bid without bothering to check it out any too carefully?

Older readers  may remember the cast iron contraptions used in such situations in the olden days, in the centre of larger towns than Epsom. A square about four feet by four feet of patterned iron, maybe one inch by half an inch in section, and with a hole in the middle for the tree. There was a problem with the trees growing out of their holes, but, that apart, it all looked much smarter and more substantial than the arrangement illustrated. Maybe our local fire and iron people could do a deal with the council? Half price for the advertisement of their wares to the so discerning public pouring out of Epsom station on weekday evenings, on their way to the 'Marquis'? Probably good for the odd bit of expensive wrought iron work if you catch them after the right number of beverages. See reference 2.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/part-of-deal.html.

Reference 2: http://www.fireandiron.co.uk/.

Unintended consquences

For a period of some years towards the end of my stay in the world of work, worthy people were making an industry of the business of data protection. I went on quite a few courses on the subject, the content of which is more or less all forgotten now. A time when we worried about whether the secretaries of tennis clubs were making improper use of the names and addresses in their care.

And now, yesterday, when we had our electricity cut off - an engineering problem affecting the road in general rather than our having overlooked the bill - the French supply company refused to talk to BH on the grounds that she was not the account holder, which was a bit of a pain as I was out. This despite that fact that we have been living at the same address and using the same electricity company (give or taking flogging it off to the French) for getting on for thirty years and have been married for rather longer than that.

This at a time when lots of large companies are busily collecting up great swathes of information about me and my affairs, information over which I have little if any control.

All very odd.

PS: I can also confirm that gas central heating does not work when the electricity does not work. Unlike in the fifties, when the parental house had three independent sources of power - gas, coke and electricity. One could lose one or two of them without losing the one or two that were left. Perhaps more of a deal then, a time when power cuts and shortages were common.