Art fair

Last Sunday to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Vision String Quartet give us Beethoven's Op.132 quartet. A new-to-us quartet with Jakob Encke (violin), Daniel Stoll (violon), Sander Stuart (viola) and Leonard Disselhorst (cello). A quartet which plays standing (apart from the cello who is allowed to sit), from memory. See reference 1.

Damaged tree

Pleased that there was a pleasantly cool breeze; a change from the heat of the day before. But there must have been more of a wind overnight as a large lump of willow had come down on Clay Hill Green. Large enough for me to worry about the fate of the tree, but in the event they just tidied it up and otherwise left the what was left of the tree alone - a weeping willow which had accidents of the same sort before.

Mild panic as we approached the station as we saw an unexpected train heading for Waterloo, which must, in the event, have been the late running train before the one we were headed for. Which last started on time but then got stuck at Worcester Park on account of a fault with the level crossing at Motspur Park, which cost us half an hour or so. We sat it out, as from Worcester Park it is not so easy to make progress forward. We were told afterwards that the best thing to do is to walk to Raynes Park; but we would not have fancied that and actually we speculated about what we would do if we arrived at London too late to get to the concert. We had aisle seats, but we were not sure whether we would be allowed in at a natural break or whether we would want to do that anyway, and were close to going for a walk along the Thames to Tower Bridge. In the event got on the tube at Vauxhall and made it to the hall with a couple of minutes to spare; a bit more flustered than we would have liked, but at least we made it.

It took me a while to settle, but I did and the quartet did very well. Although I did not know it as well as I thought as it seemed to end a little abruptly.

A jolly encore with the instruments played banjo fashion. Jolly enough, but it did go on slightly too long, detracting from the main course.

Mixing the dough

To lunch at Rossopomodoro in the John Lewis which backs onto Cavendish Square, perhaps our third visit. Started off by admiring their dough mixing machine, rather more real than the one snapped in Wigmore Street a few weeks earlier and noticed at reference 3. Working out how the arms move around above is left as an exercise for readers - with it taking me a few minutes this morning with the help of a sequence of half a dozen snaps.

Corner table, overlooking Cavendish Square. Bread and potato croquettes to start. Chicken salad for BH, spaghetti Bolognese with flat spaghetti for me. Greco di Tufo seemed to have fallen off the menu so we took a Falanghina instead. An unusual tiramisu for dessert, rather yellow in colour. Taken with two grappas, one white and one yellow. All very satisfactory.

Falanghina

Grappa with tiramisu

The clearance

Not impressed outside by the size and number of advertisements in the windows for their (John Lewis) clearance sale. I have never much cared for sales in big shops, taking the line that if one wants to do a bit of elbow work one should go to a jumble sale or a street market - with Harrods being a particularly egregious offender. So having decided not to do any shopping in John Lewis we wandered off south through Mayfair, heading vaguely for Green Park tube station.

Hanoverian art

Stopped at Hanover Square to inspect the art work that had been installed there, snapped above. With the negative merits of not being 5 metres high and of not being gratuitously offensive. On the other hand, the circle of stones had not been properly bedded in and was breaking up: perhaps the art is temporary and the parks people didn't think it worth digging serious bedding holes. The odd angle is, however, all my own.

On to admire the statue of Pitt the Younger, and to wonder, once again, at the enormous talent which got him to the top of his slippery pole in his mid twenties.

Food vouchers

The church, famous in the past for hosting the weddings of the famous, was firmly shut, despite it being Sunday. But there was a notice advertising their good works, snapped above. And if you timed it right, you could have vouchers without prayer - but were you allowed (on open days) to sleep in the pews, as you are at St. James, Piccadilly? An allowance which lends a certain familiar odour to the place.

On past the Stork restaurant, said by their website to offer the best of British with just a touch of foreign. Inspection of the menu suggested that it was indeed just that, a fancy version of the sort of thing one might get dining in a public house, with prices to match. Probably not for us, but curious readers can check out reference 4.

Stork with egg

We thought the egg was probably a permanent fixture, rather than something put up for the Mayfair Art Week. Perhaps the sexy fish restaurant in Berkeley Square has started a restaurant fashion for florid outdoor displays. And, for what it is worth, the menu offers deep fried Arlington white egg with polenta on the side, presumably nothing at all to do with the cemetery across the river from Washington, DC.

Then finally, not altogether by chance, we made it back to Mazzoleni in Albemarle Street and their Nunzio exhibition, in the hope that BH would be able to inspect the striking art work there, noticed at reference 5. And the gallery was indeed open, if empty apart from the young lady behind the counter. And we found that there was a lot more than the striking art work - for some reason called Avvoltoio, which I think is the Italian word for a vulture. Lots of stuff out back and more downstairs. We were both rather impressed and some of the stuff was actually suitable for a suburban home, not that I bothered to inquire about prices.

The telephone version of the vulture

Click to enlarge and maybe the blue stripes will be visible. They are in the original on my laptop.

The book version of the vulture

Our interest earned us a free copy of the fat, hardback book of the exhibition, containing much better photographs of the art works than I was ever going to manage on my telephone. The sort of thing you might pay £25 or more for after going to an exhibition at the Tate, ancient or modern and which contained lots of pictures of the vulture, from all angles. Clearly considered to be an important work.

Made of lots of wedge shaped slats of carbonised wood, the sort of thing you might otherwise use for lap fence panels, with the thin edges, those inside the work, being neatly painted in a vivid blue, I think it said ultramarine. A fascinating object, but one which one needs to get close to, to move around, to get the value, pictures of same seeming rather flat by comparison.

One of the other works

See reference 6 for more about it all.

A bigger Lamborghini

Outside - the bottom of the Royal Institution is visible across the road - we had a rather bigger and flashier looking Lamborghini than we can manage in Epsom and which was first noticed at reference 7. Perhaps this last is the entry level model. It would be interesting to put them side by side and play spot the difference, but I suppose that to do that I would have to track down the main dealer. Maybe somewhere else in Mayfair?

Trains still not completely right by the time we got to Vauxhall with, for example, the indicator board at Raynes Park still malfunctioning. Or at the very least, it was being fed the wrong indications. By way of compensation there were plenty of cute small children to interact with and it is perhaps just as well that most proud young parents don't mind pensioners admiring - perhaps even touching - their infant children.

Home to take a look at Huxley's 'Point Counter Point', a novel which majors on the quartet we had just heard, and despite the dated tone of the thing it remains a rewarding read. To which I may come back in due course.

Reference 1: https://www.visionstringquartet.com/en/.

Reference 2: https://www.rossopomodoro.co.uk/. On the way home we reflected on the way that we drool about restaurants which claim to be serving genuine Neapolitan food, not minding the fact that there are lots of neighbourhoods in Naples which one would not want to visit and lots of Neapolitans whom one would not wish to know.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/horszowski-trio.html.

Reference 4: https://www.storkrestaurant.com/.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/arabidopsis-thaliana.html.

Reference 6: http://mazzoleniart.com/elenco_artisti/nunzio/. And if that does not work ask Google for 'nunzio di stefano', which turns up lots of stuff.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/10/big-car.html.