Piano 100

The 100th piano was captured in the church of St. Martin's in the Fields, in Trafalgar Square yesterday (Friday) lunchtime, an expedition to be reported on otherwise in due course.

A Steinway grand. One wonders how much business the fancy new Bechstein showroom in Wigmore Street is doing, given the stranglehold that Steinway seem to have on concert venues, big and no so big. Where is their market, given the much reduced numbers of posh children being pushed through piano lessons? Children with parents with enough money to buy a decent piano for the sprog, but not so much that they don't blink at the price of a Steinway? Or perhaps the waiting list, like a posh car?

When I started taking my snap, there was no-one at the piano. But the young pianist was not going to wait the few seconds while I finished: perhaps he was in a hurry to get back to Birmingham.

PS 1: in the margins, another memory curiosity. We have been watching a police drama called 'Shetland', having watched bits of it before, perhaps a year ago. We have watched the current story before as I have the very strong sense of having seen odd scenes before. But the rest of it, maybe more than 95% of the total, seems to be completely new. I have no idea, for example, of how the story is going to end. Of who Mr. Big will turn out to be. So how much of this story is lurking in my memory banks, but inaccessible? Presumably rather more than the 5% I do seem to remember, but is it up to the 100% that some workers used to go for?

Digressing, I associate to a correspondent who once told me that one of the advantages of growing old was that if one read through one's stack of novels from top to bottom and then started back at the top again, one remembered nothing from the previous reading. Rather, it was just like reading the novel for the first time again. Very economical. Which sounds neat, but now I am not so sure. When one still has memory, second readings are often productive in ways that first readings are not. Like second hearings of a complicated piece of music.

Presumably also one can never now know about the 5%, as the old memory - whatever that might have been - has now been overwritten by the new memory. It seems unlikely that the brain would go to the bother of keeping the sort of log, never mind the associated machinery, needed to reconstruct what a memory of something was at any particular point in the past.

But jumping sideways to Google's Street View database, the joins in which are sometimes visible, reconstruction of old views seems perfectly possible, if fairly greedy of space. Maybe they recycle the camera rolls after so many months or years? But then again, maybe they don't. Perhaps some senior Google executive has lofty visions of preserving all his maps for posterity, in the way of the Mormons with their family records engraved on sheets of silica, guaranteed against baths of boiling oil for at least a million years?

PS 2: regarding the problem with facing east mentioned at reference 1, Blog search had no trouble turning up reference 3. The stuff that I was finding time for three years ago!

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/04/piano-99.html.

Reference 2: https://www.bechstein.com/.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/a-directional-fantasy.html.

Group search key: pianosk.