A proper programme

Back to the Wigmore a week or so ago for a proper programme, that is to say Haydn (Op.50 No.4) followed by Beethoven (Op.59 No.2). No exotics from the late 19th century. Given to us by the Elias Quartet whom we have heard a fair bit over the years, including a stint at Dorking. See reference 2.

A wet start. Admired the frame house on Ridgeway and wondered when they will get around to rendering the exterior block work. One might have thought one gets a better bond if the blocks are not too dry, in fact like they probably are now.

Found ourselves at the station along with a small herd of lads out with their skateboards, maybe heading for what used to be an important herding ground for same, in the margins of the Festival Hall. Not been past there for a while, so no idea whether it is still important.

Waterloo trains disturbed by engineering works overrunning. But that, as it turned out for us, as a very late running train turned up and took us to Waterloo without stopping, at something closer to InterCity than suburban speed, passing through unusual platforms, all of which meant that we got to London rather earlier than expected.

Lots of men on the lines at Waterloo. Plus a class 66 locomotive, running without wagons, trucks or carriages - locomotives not being an everyday sight in the land of the third rail. But lots of interesting snippets from reference 1. For example, the EWS freight service is actually a US owned operation. The class 66 locomotives, a successful class, were built by General Motors in Ontario before being shipped over here. Whatever happened to the British Rail locomotive building operation?

Admired the fairly low-key Christmas decorations at the top of Regent Street. Low-key they might have been, but I was slightly surprised by the serious looking steel cables used to hold them up, maybe 5mm in diameter, warranting serious looking eye bolts to tie them into the walls of the shops.

Got to All-Bar-One at around 10:45, well before they serve alcohol on a Sunday. In any event quiet and the service was fast. I dare say, in common with many such places, they take more money on food these days than booze: I don't think that we have ever eaten at this particular one, but we did once eat at their Wimbledon branch. Perfectly satisfactory, as I recall.

Rather to our surprise, the Haydn did not work as well for us as we have come to expect. Maybe there was something different about this particular one that we were not used to. But the Beethoven was fine. With the encore being a Gaelic lullaby. Very folksy. Perhaps the very same piece as I had heard just about three years previously and noticed at reference 3.

To Ponti's of reference 4 for lunch yet again. They are clearly in favour with us, and with a lot of other people, as they were busy on this occasion. Same menu yet again: bread basket to start, spicy pizza for him, salad for her. The reliable 'Fiano di Avelino I Favati' to drink, as noticed properly at reference 5.

At one point we had a lady with her granddaughter at the next table, a lady from Oxford. Which provided an opportunity to brush up our own Oxford connections. Principally, BH's father who was born in Oxford - despite his father being in the Navy - and my maternal grandfather who certainly lived in Oxford before he legged it to Canada, a few years before the first world war. I think he did a stint as a chorister at one of the colleges and that his musical skills gave him the entrée in Canada, at a time when people had to make their own entertainment, at least most of the time.

Lunched up, decided that home was the next step, rather than shopping.

A little surprised to find an advertisement for Moorfields Private Hospital, which turns out to be a division of the regular Eye Hospital, to be found at reference 6. The place you get to by following the broad white line painted on the pavement from the nearest tube station, that is to say Old Street. Or perhaps it should be used to get to.

I dare say the management line is that the private operation pulls in some of the money needed to provide a proper service at the public operation. The Tories might say that people should be allowed to buy a better class of service than can reasonably be provided by a universal public service, if that is what they want to spend their money on. And I dare say that most hospitals have private wards these days: the hospital at Epsom certainly does. Not enthusiastic about it, not least because I have no idea of the extent to which the private service is subsidized by the staff training element of the public service, but I don't suppose any of this is going to change any time soon, even if Labour get back in a couple of years' time. They will have more important things to worry about.

And while we are on subsidies, how many of the huge number of highly paid IT security consultants out there, were trained at government expense in places like GCHQ? Maybe this is a reasonable way to build the skills needed to run a modern economy? Given the time of day, all much too complicated.

A bit flashier than the version that I remember from the days of Southwest Trains. Maybe I will get around to tracing notice of same.

A quick stop at the Raynes Park Platform Library, where we picked up a couple of copies of 'The Lady', mainly, I suppose, read by the domestic servants of people who would like to think of themselves as lords and ladies, if only in spirit. The extensive small ads offer an aperçu of the sort of jobs on offer these days. The pay, conditions and perks don't look bad: I suppose the catch is that for a significant proportion of your day you are a servant, you have to be servile. And I imagine a significant proportion of the employers are pretty grim, in one way or another. Civil servant is one thing, domestic servant quite another. In any event, the two magazines have provided entertainment at breakfast.

But maybe it was a bad sample. The snap above doesn't suggest service at all.

PS: a bit later. I find one indicator board on my first search (key=platform+waterloo) of psmv4, at reference 8. Which proves that I first saw the indicator board in its present format just about two years ago. Yet another memory failure. While a second search turned up reference 9, just about five years ago, and a bit closer to the original. 

In doing this, I was expecting a picture of the board, so a fairly crude search followed by a fast eyeball scan down the result was much quicker than trying to be clever with the search key. Except that did not turn up the first notice, at reference 10, which had an unhelpful title and did not carry a picture, but is reachable from reference 9. We get there in the end.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_66.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=elias.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/10/elias.html.

Reference 4: http://www.pontis.co.uk/.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/09/d956.html.

Reference 6: https://www.moorfields.nhs.uk/.

Reference 7: https://lady.co.uk/.

Reference 8: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/tree-show.html.

Reference 9: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/09/spot-difference.html.

Reference 10: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/02/swanage.html.