As it turned out, a cool evening with a hint of showers. I gambled taking a scarf but not an umbrella, this last being something of a nuisance at the Institution. A gamble which, in the event, paid off.
Got to Vauxhall to find the tube station concourse full of people, with the suggestion that nothing much was going on down below. Back into the railway station where, not knowing the form, I try various platforms before getting a train to take me on to Waterloo. Which got stuck outside Waterloo. About 15 minutes lost so far. Eventually made to the Goat just after 1830 to find no staff behind the bar, so, for once in a while, repaired to the Nicolson's house across the road.
Onto the Institution to find that was full of people too, with a special queue being in operation to manage the crowd. A sell-out and by the time we started the lecture theatre was as full as I had ever seen it. Notwithstanding, I made it to a seat with both foot room and fast exit.
I shall come back to the substance of the talk in a post to come. Suffice it to say for the present that when de Waal started out, animal emotion was a bit of a non-subject, Darwin's seminal work (reference 1) having fallen into disuse. While now it is more or less generally accepted that lots of animals do emotions, particularly primates. He did not say anything about the interaction of language, which primates do not have, with emotions and I did not think to ask afterwards.
De Waal was something of a star performer, almost more a celebrity than a scientist, and he had the audience, particularly the female half, eating out of his hand, loyally [see below] laughing at his weakest witticisms. He pitched the talk at about the right level and he had good slides, perhaps a little too slick for the occasion. It would also have been helpful had the slides been published afterwards as they contained a number of useful looking references which I had not caught on the fly. Perhaps by making the slides available to those who had bought tickets, which could no doubt be organised with Eventbrite, the people to whom selling the tickets was sub-contracted and who held all the email addresses.
There were ladies in the audience who made the equation animals have feelings therefore it is wrong to euthanise them, let alone to eat them. De Waal believed that both were OK, with the caveat that it would probably be well if we were to do less eating, and he nicely fielded the questions thereon. Helped along by the MC, Shaun Fitzgerald, who nicely timed moving on.
Afterwards, back through Vauxhall which was back up again, pausing at the Half Way House at Earlsfield, pleasantly quiet on this occasion, with the musak kept down within reasonably bounds. But the wine (Youngs) was dearer than it had been in Mayfair (Nicolsons).
Some aeroplane spotting on the platform at Earlsfield, but I still have to find the sweet spot to stand. So a couple of two's, but mainly one's. I was reminded that there were at least three entry points to the flight path down to Heathrow, with one involving a sharp right over Clapham Junction.
Travelcard rather tiresome on this occasion, with the system logic possibly having been messed up by my going back into Vauxhall Station at the start of the evening. Perhaps the Travelcard people need to work a bit harder on their fraud detection logic, the stuff which attempts to stop, for example, two people travelling on the one card, with person one passing the card back to person two across the barrier.
Other problems included OneNote trying to second guess what I was trying to write the whole time, my telephone battery running down quite a lot way in the course of the evening, and not being in the Goat resulting in my not taking my warfarin at the right time. The break in routine was too much for it.
PS: I learned yesterday that 'loyal' has a rather different meaning in French than it does in English, a meaning more closely connected to its roots in 'loi' or law. So a person who is loyal, in this case Maigret, is someone who sticks to the rules, does it by the book. Plays fair with his customers.
Reference 1: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals - Charles Darwin - 1872.
Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=shaun. Previous notice of Fitzgerald.
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