St. John's

A couple of weeks ago, a first visit to St. John's for a while, for five years n fact, since before the plague. See reference 1: our one and only encounter with the Concert de Hostel Dieu from Lyon. Very good they were too.

A day which might have turned out wet, but that was no excuse for failing to find any figs on the large fig tree across the rails from the Waterloo platform. But at least I now know that taking a picture of a tree from inside a train is difficult.

A short snooze on the train, but I managed to get out at Vauxhall and pedal myself across to Smith Square, where I took the penultimate slot. A little early, so I thought a bacon sandwich would be the thing. A sort of early lunch. I vaguely remembered that there was a suitable place in Horseferry Road, which I must have passed hundreds of times over the years but never used.

And so it proved to be. A busy place with a proprietor whom I took to be Italian and who looked as if he had been running the place for years. Busy with both eat-out and eat-in trade. A very mixed clientele: young, old, male, female, white collar and blue collar. Good sandwich, only slightly let down by the bacon being rather salty. Still a little early, so I took a small beverage from the Marquis nearly next door, busy indoors but mild enough to sit outside in comfort.

Into St. John's where I found that they had arranged the seats for a smaller audience. It all looked rather well. The programme being two piano trios, neither of which I knew, given by the newly hatched Azuri Piano Trio. So newly hatched that they do not yet have a website - or at least, if they do, I failed to find it.

The Rachmaninoff starts well enough at reference 2, but somehow I did not connect on the day. I even nodded a bit in the middle. Got on much better with the Brahms.

Out to find lots of big black limousines parked outside the EU building there which houses the Delegation of the European Union to the United Kingdom. Big Mercedes with plates like 'LUX 1'. Plus the odd black transit, perhaps for the more security conscious dignitaries. Big flashy Maserati for the chap from Italy. I never did get to find out what was going on.

Pedalled back to Vauxhall, pondering the options for the second part of lunch. In the end, I got to the top of the stairs more or less at the same time as a train to Epsom so I settled for that. No beverage. No diversions. No Raynes Park platform library. All in all, a very restrained expedition.

PS 1: this morning I read about milk in a review in the NYRB of the book at reference 3. The claim there is that milk is a relatively recent addition to the diet of most people in or from north western Europe, that is to say the people who suffer least from intolerance to cows' milk. That is is not a particularly healthy food - inter alia, very prone to invasion by all kinds of bugs - which has been foisted on us by Big Dairy - working hand-in-glove on this with Big Meat. Getting rid of it would do wonders for global warming, especially if it went hand-in-glove with getting rid of beef - which I assume is the destiny of most of the cows raised for milk. The good news is that the consumption of milk in the US is steadily declining anyway, perhaps a third now of what it was in the 1940's.

Eye catching illustration from Masha Krasnova Shabaeva, with Google turning up plenty more of her work.

PS 2: negotiations about the redevelopment of the site at the corner of West Hill and Station Approach continue, with the heritage people having succeeded in driving the building down from ten stories or so to six. All this rigmarole must add a lot to the cost of the new building, drag out the time line, take away from the number of new housing units and take away from the profit margin - this last being needed for there to be any movement at all. Making one think that surely there must be a better way of doing things. Maybe trimming the claws of Surrey's heritage army while we are at it.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/pergolesi-again.html.

Reference 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeHNHqUYmNE.

Reference 3: Spoiled: The myth of milk as superfood - Anne Mendelson - 2023.