Last week I thought to take a nostalgia trip to the Prince of Wales at Wimbledon, a house I used to use in the olden days between trains. A time before I made much use of the Half Way House at Earlsfield; perhaps before that house had been upgraded from quiet working men's boozer, to better cater for all the bright young things who were then flooding into the area.
Started the proceedings with an afternoon snooze, more than an hour of it, not something I do very often these days, not going out very much of an evening. Then warmed up with the letters page of the NYRB where a correspondent was taking a reviewer to task for misquoting Virginia Woolf on the subject of Spenser's Faerie Queene, presently the subject of the occasional post. The context being the list of eminent people who thought that the Faerie Queene was a back number, perhaps an important milestone in the development of English poetry, but no longer worth the bother, no longer worth the candle. The reviewer did not care to admit to a mistake or to a spot of carelessness or to not bothering to check her facts before she put hands to keyboard, choosing rather to conduct a fighting retreat. Flanneling around the subject rather than simply admitting error. I suppose there is something to be said for both approaches, but on this occasion I thought it made the reviewer look a bit silly.
It turned into a fine, bright evening and I marched down to Epsom Station, to find one trolley (not captured), one indigent (who neither asked nor received alms) and three Epsom Bean trees, two with beans and one without. Not to be confused with the Indian Bean tree of reference 1 and elsewhere. Not that there should be any confusion as apart from both having beans they are very different: very different format beans and very different format leaves. But asking Bing about 'trees beans' rapidly results in the Majestic Honey Locust tree. Not rowans as I had thought earlier in the year at all.
Masks more or less absent, apart from my own, on the London platforms. Train itself slightly better. But given images like that above (reference 2) is it surprising? Will our fat leader's gamble (with our lives) pay off?
Prince of Wales quiet, but far from empty. Plenty of staff on duty.
Above our seats we had one of those air conditioners introduced into public houses as the anti-puffers made headway. The things about the size and shape of a large suitcase. We also had a television offering an aerial view of an important football match. And, for the first time, I noticed the interesting patterns that the players made on the pitch - patterns which I suppose would be much harder to see at the ground, at least unless one was sat fairly high up.
Home to sample the days bake, batch No.624, now superseded by batch No.625. Bread good, even if the slicing left something to be desired.
I learned about smuggling drugs into prisons by soaking the paper of privileged letters (Rule 39 letters) in a solution of the drug in question. Sadly, the Metro did not see fit to explain how you then consumed the drug. Did you just grind up the paper and smoke it in a roll-up? Perhaps mixed with tobacco, assuming that is that smoking has not been cast out of prisons in the same way as it has been cast out of public houses. One more reason for troubled young men, incarcerated with nothing much to do, to get troublesome.
Then, prompted by one Susan Stewart writing about ruins (page 46 in my copy), I was moved to look up Joshua in the good book; Chapter 6 in particular. Which is not very edifying at all: when the city fell at the seventh trump (magic number seven yet again), all the men, women, children and domestic animals therein were all put to the sword. Only Rehab the harlot was let off because she had betrayed the city to Joshua. And while Joshua was a bit squeamish about taking regular household goods which might have been tainted, gold and silver were OK and they were carried off to the temple. Money didn't smell, even then. Traitors were rewarded, even then. Which made me think about all the people who really believe in all this stuff.
Our Bible, or at least the one I mostly use, comes no critical or explanatory wrapping, in the way the secular classics often do, but there were some historical maps at the end, some of which seemed oddly detailed - but I suppose that back in the 1930's, when this Bible was probably printed, we were confident that we Brits knew all there was to know about the Holy Land. And I did learn that Jerusalem was one of a string of towns and cities strung out along the crest of the hills running north and south along the west bank of the Jordan. And that Bethlehem was to the south of Jerusalem, rather than to the north as I had thought. Jericho, off crest, to the north west.
References
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/indian-bean-tree.html.
Reference 2: Boris Johnson speaks at the first post-reshuffle cabinet meeting in Downing street, London. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty. Guardian 17th September. I note that Stansall might live in Tunbridge Wells, but he is listed as being a staff photographer with the French mob at reference 3. So however did he get into the Cabinet Room in Downing Street?
Reference 3: https://www.afp.com/en/news-hub.
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