Trio Gaspard

The pull here being Dvořák's Dumky trio, with the additional items being perfectly acceptable. And with the Gaspard Trio of reference 1 being new to us, at least absent from the archive.

As it turned out, a cold, damp morning - something of a change from the day previous which had been bright and cheerful enough. Also a change in that we opted for Ewell West by car, rather than walking to Epsom Station. It was also a first outing for my new jacket, noticed at reference 2. BH queried my calling it a jacket, thinking it was too big and grand for that. Perhaps a car coat or a parka? The former term being much bandied about when we were young.

Another adventure with the RingGo parking application. Which was fine, but my bank is still checking each transaction and I have not yet learned how to get the 6 digit authorisation code from one part of my telephone to another without memorising it or writing it down. I am sure that some form of copy and paste must be available, but I have not yet taken the time to find out where it is. Yet another job loitering on my busy to-do list.

Past a real person in the booking office on our way to the platform, where we had around 5 minutes to wait. Spot on. Until we heard that our train had been cancelled and there was a half hour wait. A down side of Ewell West being that one is committed to the Waterloo line, no chance of help from the Victoria line. At which point I was glad to be snug in my new jacket. Furthermore, we had a bus shelter to sit in and the train, when it arrived, was an eight coacher, not an overcrowded four coacher.

Major works at Motspur Park continue, presumably to do with the new footbridge and lifts. Access to the Earl Beatty still rather restricted.

Instant offer of a seat on the tube at Vauxhall. I must have been looking a bit tired and ancient - something I had first noticed a couple of weeks previously in a mirror at T K Maxx. Must be careful about the cut and colour of my outer clothes!

Arrived at Oxford Circus a bit short of time, certainly no time for our usual pit-stop at All-Bar-One, but we made it to the more or less full hall with a couple of minutes to spare. I even found time to snap a flashy car. This morning Google Images tells me that it is a Lamborghini Huracán LP 640-4 Performante, with the make at least confirmed by zoom. Autotrader tells me that I can have a second hand one for prices ranging up to something over £200,000. So a lot of car to leave on a street, scratchable by any passing drunk. Not that this is ever going to be a problem for me.

In the hall, lots of microphones and other signs of recording activity, so perhaps there was some live streaming going on. The trio used electrical scores, apart from the piano who used real music some of the time. I noticed that he kept his page turner to press the page button on his computer at other times. Maybe he did not care for the DIY options on offer, with foot not being very convenient.

All very good, with the Dumky as good as ever. It wears well after what must be quite a few hearings now.

Opted for lunch at the Place to Eat, near the top of John Lewis. A better than average cafeteria for a big store. We took fish and chips, a bit bland, but fresh and decent. Fake mushy peas, as is usual these days, blended from frozen. Staff as pleasant as ever. A good place if one does not want a full-on lunch with all the trimmings.

And I learned that you can now buy second hand clothes and Selfridges. Also about a good cause which John Lewis is involved in which helps young people leaving care to get a decent start as adults.

For some reason this struck a chord at the time, possibly because children in care had been in a recent police drama on television. In any event, it all looks very worthy, so this morning they got my winter fuel allowance, via some new-to-me donation operation called Givestar, to be found at reference 4. Where I did not mind being asked about Gift Aid, but I did mind being asked if I wanted to top up my donation. Which I didn't.

And so back onto the train, the only sign of remembrance activity being a couple of older chaps at Wimbledon station with their medals up. No sign of any demonstrators. Several aeroplanes, in and out of the clouds. We decided to sit it out at Wimbledon, rather than change at Raynes Park for the platform library, mainly because Ewell West meant that we were at the wrong end of the platform.

Home to various messages and emails from RingGo which suggested that our parking experience had worked out OK.

PS 1: following notice in a footnote to the post at reference 3, I have just been reading in the Guardian about how Palantir have won a big contract to sort out our NHS data. A company which is owned by somebody with obnoxious views and which sells some of its products for some rather unsavoury purposes. Thinking also here of the amount of money that the US government spend with Mr. Musk (of Tesla fame and Twitter ill-fame), I wonder how practical it is for governments to avoid doing business with unpleasant people who have good products? A luxury that private citizens can sometimes afford, but maybe it is not so easy for governments. There was certainly no provision in the sort of modest procurements that I was involved in for marking down candidates whom one did not like - and I am fairly sure that the procurement police would not have let me do such a thing - although that said, one could usually bend the rules a bit without them sparking off. A government might strike a company off the list, but a humble servant was not given discretion to tamper with the scales. Any bending was on his own head if he got caught.

PS 2: senior living in Maryland, brought to me by the NYT. 'Carminetta Verner, 88, has become the go-to source for cannabis information at her retirement community, the sprawling Leisure World complex in Montgomery County, Md., which houses about 8,000 older adults'. Makes our Abbeyfield look a bit provincial! And by way of comparison, the hospital snapped in the previous post, reference 7, housed just 750 patients. Say 1,000 souls with resident staff - and it would be interesting to know about the space per person. In the meantime, see references 5 and 6.

References

Reference 1: https://www.triogaspard.com/.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/11/shopping.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/06/bells-on-hand.html.

Reference 4: https://givestar.io/.

Reference 5: https://leisureworldmaryland.com/.

Reference 6: https://missiondispensaries.com/getting-started/.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/11/better-here.html.