Piano 59

Captured shortly after the Wellingtonia at reference 2. That is to say the piano was inside the same church of St. Andrew of Chippenham that the tree was outside of. A Yamaha grand from Duck Son & Pinker of Bath, a company which lives on at reference 3, in its hey-day a Tier I piano tuning operation.

Now, sadly, with the piano business melting away in the face of television, video games and so forth, the once proud piano tuner & manufacturer, with a shop in a once smart street just by Pulteney Bridge in Bath, is now an opticians. Like undertakers and plumbers, their business is not going to go away any time soon. But, to be fair, being Bath, this is no Specsavers. Cutler & Gross are optical architects who make spectacles and other stuff for the rich and famous, that is to say artists, rock stars, writers and royalty. See reference 4.

St. Andrew's is a church with two altars, a nave altar in front of the screen and a chancel altar for more intimate occasions. There was what looked like a small keyboard between the nave altar and the screen, but I did not like to go and investigate. Perhaps next time.

PS 1: Microsoft News, usually a peddler of tripe and worse, has just drawn my attention to the 2021 Defence Review, the subject of reference 5. It does not now seem very clever to me to be dropping more than 9,000 soldiers and a whole lot of (albeit old) tanks and maybe our fat leader needs to ask the review team to take another look. Maybe even to admit that we are going to have to spend more on defence and less on consumer goods and foreign holidays. The world has changed. Maybe the leader of the other lot can be persuaded to stop sitting on the fence in the hope that the plum will just fall into his lap. It would be so much better if he earned it.

PS 2: better still if we had not get into such a mess with replacing our Warrior infantry fighting vehicles. The defence of the realm continues to be littered with expensive projects which have gone wrong and I wonder now whether other countries are as bad at this as we are. And if not, why not.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/05/piano-58.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/06/wellingtonia-82.html.

Reference 3: https://thetunersblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/duck-son-pinker-pianos.html. '... I remember tales from the old tuners when I was an apprentice: they were given a bicycle, put on a train to South Wales, and told to go up and down the valleys going door to door for piano tuning work! Those really were the golden days...'.

Reference 4: https://www.cutlerandgross.com/.

Reference 5: UK military makes sweeping cuts as focus moves to technological warfare: Army to lose 9,500 personnel while older tanks, aircraft and warships will be retired - Helen Warrell, Sylvia Pfeifer, Financial Times - 2021.

Reference 6: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/defence-in-a-competitive-age. Defence in a competitive age - Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Defence by Command of Her Majesty - March 2021. The full 72 pages.

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