To the pictures

A couple of weeks ago, to the pictures, our first expedition to see a recently released film for a while. Ian McKellan's 'The Critic', adapted from the book at reference 2, itself a book by a literary journalist, something of a critic himself. A story from the days - say the 1920s or 1930s - when newspaper critics - of books, music and theatre - were probably a lot more important than they are now. When newspapers were a lot more important than they are now. 

So all very incestuous: a film adapted from a book about a critic by a critic, all about a rather outrageous, elderly, gay theatre critic played by an elderly, gay actor. Gemma Arterton gets a look-in too.

A film which was being screened in a small way at our local Odeon: that is to say not many screenings a day compared with its more popular offerings, mostly of which looked noisy and violent.

The day had started with the visit to Lidl already noticed at reference 1. After an afternoon snooze, I decided that the cinema would be better without the rollator. Which meant that I discovered that while, with the rollator, my natural walking speed was rather faster than BH, without it I was rather slower. A little early, so one sit on the way.

We passed the rival Picture House operation in Ebbisham Square, now finally open after having hung fire for what had seemed like a long time.

Looking at their offering today, not particularly attracted to anything, not even heard of much of it, although it does look more varied than that at the Odeon. While, curiously, the zoom option provided by Edge only seems to work in the vertical dimension.

Back with the critic, as I was in the Upper High Street anyway, I had bought the tickets in the morning, so nothing to do except to climb up to Screen 7, probably the smallest, to find that about a dozen of us had turned out for this early Saturday evening showing. Big seats at the back with a good view.

Not for the first time, struck by the amount of popcorn and confectionary that people take in with them. They must have very serious carpet cleaning machines with which to tidy up afterwards.

The half hour warm up was a bit grim, even with my eyes shut. Even so, a film does need something in front to warm things up, something to frame the proceedings. I seem to remember that going to the sort of cinema where they take you from silence to film does not really work for me either.

And then the film itself, a decently made costume drama, which seemed a bit too long at 90 minutes. Lots of bad language, lots of old-time gay goings on. Rather lush. All in all, it struck me as a bit self indulgent. And I was irritated by the apparent failure to test the water in the lungs of the drowned actress (Arterton) for salt. Any self respecting fan of 'Vera' knows about that, although I don't recall Agatha covering the point.

After the film we strolled down to Wetherspoon's, busy but with a few tables available inside. We decided that we were not in the mood for all the bustle and noise and retreated across the road to the Marquis, where my stick earned me exemplary service from the young bar staff.

Walked home to finish off the first of the two sausages bought from Lidl earlier in the day, as reported at the previously mentioned reference 1.

BH is now reading the book of the film, which Waterstones were able to get for me in two or three days. No charge for postage or packing. Not racing through, but getting through and I shall have my turn in due course. And, I dare say, should opportunity arise, we will watch the film again, longueurs notwithstanding.

PS: a bit late, so it would not have been possible to return this trolley to the M&S food hall, even had BH been happy to mind my trolley. No score.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/lidl.html.

Reference 2: Curtain Call - Antony Quinn - 2015.

Reference 3: https://www.rlf.org.uk/writer/anthony-quinn/.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/12/living.html. Our last expedition to the cinema, just about two years ago, to a rather different sort of film. But it did involve another older actor.

The matter of roads

I have now looked into the matter of roads, mentioned near the beginning of the last post, reference 1, using a mixture of the Ordnance Survey and Wikipedia. That is to say, I knew all about A1 thru A5, the original, radial trunk roads from London. But what about A10 through A50, the next tier down?

It turns out the the A10 is something of an exception, still running more or less from the southern outskirts of Kings Lynn all the way down to London Bridge. The A20 joins the A2 at Deptford. The A30 joins the A4 at Hounslow West, a junction which used to be important to me as the best place that I knew to start hitching from London to the west country, a method of travel which was still entirely practicable in my student days: reasonably fast and very cheap. Getting badly stuck was rare. The A40 makes it all the way to Paddington Station, where it becomes the A501, which runs across the north side of central London to Euston station. A junction which used to be important to me as the place where I plied my one-time trade as a materials technician (concrete) with Messrs Sandberg of reference 2, at a time when the Westway was a building site for John Laing, a time when main contractors were main contractors and were not submerged in a sea of sub-contractors.

While the A50 seems to have got rather lost. It was once the main road from London to Leicester, but now only seems to live on in a stretch of road leading to Warrington up north.

On the up side, I have learned about the A6, which used to branch off the A1 for Carlisle at Barnet, a little to the north of London. Not one of the original quintet, but a long and important road nonetheless. See reference 3 for a sample of Wikipedia's efforts in this department.

PS 1: here at Epsom we are on the A24, which now branches off the A3 at Clapham Common tube station, from where it makes it more or less all the way to Worthing. Important enough that you get signs at Elephant & Castle.

PS 2: while Cycle Superhighway No.7 (recently renamed), a route I use from time to time, either on a Bullingdon or on foot, follows the A3 from Elephant & Castle until Clapham Common, where it takes off down the A24.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-bent-crane.html.

Reference 2: https://www.sandberg.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A6_road_(England).

The bent crane

I have now followed up on the story of the crane at reference 1. So off to London with a short shopping list: plums and marzipan. With the option of Korean (Borough Market) or Van Gogh (Liverpool Street Station) immersive art shows afterwards.

Mildy irritated by all the in-train announcements and by the crinkling of sweet wrappers across the aisle from me. But I managed to divert myself with wondering about the A road numbering system, A1 thru A5 radially around London. With the curiosity of the jump across the estuary between the A1 and the A2. Then we have the A10 which makes it own way down to the City, seemingly independent of the A1. But what about A20 thru A50. A matter which I have yet to look into. 

All this on a very smooth Southern train, a train which could set off more or less silently - that is to say one would not know if one had one's eyes shut - but stopping silently it could not manage. It could not do away with a slight rock-back on the brakes. No doubt an engineer could explain what that was about. Maybe the naval uncle could have.

First stop, Borough Market, a good deal more crowded late on a Friday morning than in the snap above. Where I bought (cheap) a large bag of greengages and (dear) a smaller bag of cob nuts. Not very happy about the greengages, which I should have tried before buying. Cheap because they were very ripe. But maybe they would do for something.

Pushed on over London Bridge and up the A10, aka Gracechurch Street. Took a comfort break in the margins of a smart looking cafe taken out of a corner of a smart new building and then thought to take a look at the atrium of the smart new building, decorated as it was with very arty looking wooden furniture. A lot a foreign young men were in attendance and eyed me very suspiciously, and when I went to take a picture, I was more or less escorted off the premises. They were taking their instructions very seriously.

More arty wooden furniture. Photography just about tolerated.

More or less opposite this left-over from the 19th century. Identified today by Google Images: once the headquarters of the National Provincial Bank, then Grade I listed, then an event space, now unused. See reference 2. I suppose there are more dead banking halls in the City than there are dead churches - and banking halls at least lend themselves to the Wetherspoon's treatment. Notwithstanding the fine conversion they did on George's Meeting House  - an 18th Century Unitarian Chapel - in South Street, Exeter.

Thoroughly confused both inside and outside Liverpool Steet Station, not a little put out that I remembered so little of it, despite having spent more than five years going through it every day, with my bicycle. In my defence, that was around forty years ago.

The first sighting of the bent crane. Direct access blocked, so I had to work my way around.

Quite a lot of these vans around, as was the UK headquarters of UBS. Were the vans a sort of toy company for burnt-out bankers to be put out to grass on? Not too far from home, as it were, so they could pretend to their families that they were still going to work in town.

Getting closer.

Up close and personal. A McAlpine's engineer who happened to be standing by explained that the whole crane was owned by McAlpine's, not a hire job at all, with the top portion being a standard tower and the bottom portion a special. I think the story was, on my observing that the ties into the tower adjacent did not look as if they were doing that much work, was that most of the work was done by the sloping green structure, a lot of which was not visible, behind hoarding or underground. With the complication that the green structure had to keep out of the way of the brown structure, destined to hold up the floor and external walls of the new building.

I dare say that a diagram would have been helpful, but that would be a bit much to expect on the pavement.

I think that McAlpine's, of reference 3, must be one of the few big civil engineers around during my concrete days that are still around, still visible, today.

From the other side.

The scene as a whole.

Thought about taking lunch in the Sun Street Hotel - the public house next door looked a bit raucous with blue collars - but I failed to find the entrance and pushed onto to the nearby All Bar One instead. Perhaps just as well, the web site looks a bit grand, although drinks do not look particularly expensive. Maybe they would have drawn the line at my rollator.

I thought the big All Bar One, at the south western corner of Finsbury Square, was quiet for a Friday lunchtime. But they could do the same paella as the branch at Regent Street, and while it might not be quite as authentic as the offering at Borough Market, at least I could take it sitting down in comfort. But it was a bit of a mystery to me how only a few months previously I had managed two of them. Perhaps the cycling up from Victoria had given me more of an appetite on that occasion. See reference 5.

Lots of school girls wandering about, just like girls from Epsom's Rosebery, so there must have been a school in the vicinity. One lady carrying a cheap version of the Stockholm 2 seat. One lady dressed very high, very expensive, for the middle of the day. She looked a bit out of place. A lot more blue collars than I had expected. But I guess that all the buildings have to be built and then they have to be serviced. All  kinds of people. Having a window seat had its points.

Leaving All Bar One, my mind turned to marzipan. There was also the question of some plums which would be more suitable than the greengages for the pie that BH had in mind. So down into a large M&S food hall, where I was pleased to be able to meet both requirements: large red plums and marzipan. In fact, the pleasant lady at the till where I paid told me that the place was big enough to cope with real shopping, the sort of thing that BH usually does in Sainsbury's; not just a fast food place at all. I had already noticed that they did real Atora suet, a brand which must have been around forever.

The receptionist in the building with this cycle on display was a lot more friendly and helpful than the young men had been earlier in the day. I was not to climb into it, but I was welcome to take pictures. She assured me that it was real, not faked up for the purposes of display, but she did not know where it came from, other than it was some fad of the owner - or the tenant - of the building.

The windows says 24kws.com - for 24 King William Street - but it is not clear that this website exists. However, Bing does tell me that '2018 - Ella Valley Capital bought the building through off-market acquisition for c.£100m reflecting a capital value of £1,237 per sq ft'. Ella Valley Capital appears to be a US property operation, where part of the operation may be holding high value property for the very rich. Chinese billionaires who don't want to flaunt it for one reason or another? Rainy day stuff? See reference 7.

Next stop the Custom House, as noticed at reference 6.

Next stop a confusion of Findlaters the wine people and Finlays the tobacco people. I think both have have expired, although the building above appears to be the subject of some kind of a heritage operation. A once well known landmark, which I need to take a closer look at.

Abandoned immersive art shows and climbed on the train home instead.

Where I snapped the ancient VW above, which has been sitting, for a long time now, in the drive of an expensive house on the same Chase Estate where we live. There is presumably some tragic back story.

With this more delicate form of decay a little further along.

And home proper, I was in luck. It turned out that BH was rather fond of greengages, even rather ripe ones. And the half she stewed turned out much better than I expected.

The cob nuts were fine, even if the very large shells led one to expect rather larger nuts than one usually found inside.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/action-next-week.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_Hall,_London.

Reference 3: https://srm.com/.

Reference 4: https://sunstreethotel.com/.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/04/grub-up.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/church-two.html.

Reference 7: https://www.ellavalleycapital.com/.

Labels

Following the red grapefruit experience at Lyme Regis, noticed at reference 1, I have been taking red grapefruit. Worries about edoxaban derived from the warfarin I took before, appear to be unfounded, with the story at reference 2 being 'Apart from being careful with alcohol there are no foods or drinks you need to avoid while taking edoxaban'. On the other hand, they are quite sweet and quite wet, which pits them against a desire to cut down on sugar and a need to restrict water intake.

I take mine cut in half with a teaspoon, an ordinary teaspoon rather than the serrated teaspoon considered important when I was young. Maybe two halves to a session. While BH, before she stopped using grapefruit, used to peel hers like an orange, although nothing like as neatly as those turned up above.

Today, I was moved to wonder about the sticker bearing the number #4288, fruit numbers which I have wondered about before - but it took a little while to track this down to ten years ago using the #4105 code for a Cox's apple (a rather abused term these days). Attempts using search terms like fruit, label or sticker having failed. I got there in the end via reference 4 and then using the code for the Pink Lady apple.

Price look up codes appear to be looked after by the people at reference 5, although I have yet to work out exactly what role these codes have. No stickers on today's red grapefruits from Sainsbury's. No stickers on the fruit in the snap above, lifted from their website - which has served to remind me that while you might put stickers on grapefruits and apples, you are not going to bother with strawberries or cherries. Not least because you might have a problem with sticking.

Perhaps something to fill the gap left by the pause in trolley collecting.

Then, prompted by reading of Judi Dench sponsoring deserving young actors through drama school, I started to wonder how actors fared in the 19th century, when I don't suppose there was much in the way of drama schools, but there was a a great deal in the way of travelling repertory companies. Perhaps aspiring young actors and actresses just attached themselves to such a company and gradually moved up from entry level tea making, through noises off to the dizzy heights of actor in rep. Rather in the way of an old-style a craft apprenticeship.

I imagine that the numbers of actors now is hugely less than it was in the long-lost days of rep, with television and film not taking up anything like the slack. But we do have lots of theatre schools - even if some of them, like the one we have here in Epsom, are mainly about turning out dance fodder for musicals and cruise liners. An occupation from which one presume that most are ejected before they are thirty. But the young ones do brighten up the Epsom pavements on warm days!

I associate to the book about Constable noticed at reference 5, where I am sure there was talk of wannabee painters from humble backgrounds attaching themselves to established painters as studio dogsbodies, there to learn the trade. Wannabees from monied backgrounds had an easier time of it, as ever.

I close on a more optimistic note. I learned yesterday that Bidfood and Brakes have not quite sewn up the catering food supply business between them, coming across a lorry from Magma, an outfit which is clearly in that business too.

I learn from their website all about the new-to-me smash burgers, where the smashing is all to do with the way that they are cooked, rather than with the way that they are made.

PS: Wikipedia claims that the term 'dogsbody' has a Royal Naval dried pea origin. A story which is at least half confirmed by my OED, in that it or 'dog's body' was lower deck slang for pease pudding. But it does not confirm the extension to persons, which perhaps came later. On the other hand, taking the opportunity to check that 'toggle' was present (it was), a word I used in a recent game of Scrabble, I was pleased to find that 'toller' was also present, scoring several head words, mainly (but not exclusively) to do with tolls or taxes. Perhaps a couple of column inches.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-home-run.html.

Reference 2: https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/edoxaban/common-questions-about-edoxaban/.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=4105.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_look-up_code.

Reference 5: https://www.ifpsglobal.com/.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/constable.html.

Reference 7: https://www.magnafoodservice.co.uk/.

New blood

Things are a looking a bit grim for for sensible, two party politics if a leadership contender for one of them goes in for the sort of thing that this one does. Is she trying to beat our former fat leader at his own game? Is she taking lessons from the former fat leader over the pond?

Grim not least because it might take us a very long time to learn to play the many party, coalition games they go in for on the continent. Not least because we seem to be very stuck on the status quo at our antiquated Houses of Parliament. Noting that what they are good at is assimilating and absorbing newbies and wannabee reformers. In which connection, see, for example, the second postscript at reference 2.

And then there was the hard-to-reverse own goal of allowing members to vote for leaders, an own goal scored by both main parties. All those expensive classical educations and they still haven't learned that indirect democracy is better than the direct sort. Perhaps they did not get onto the book by Mackay noticed at reference 3.

References

Reference 1: Badenoch says UK civil servants should be ‘in prison’: Comments come after Tory leadership rival Robert Jenrick defended his claims about special forces - Lucy Fisher, Jim Pickard, Financial Times - 2024. 

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/his-and-hers.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/a-last-outing.html.