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A few weeks ago, the poet who doubles as a columnist in the TLS wrote a very strong peice about his experience buying new shoes in a place called Niketown in Oxford Circus. It seems that he has serious problems with his feet - bunions or gout or something - and it had been suggested that Nike was the answer; more particularly the sort of custom built Nikes that you can buy from the very bouncy people at Niketown. As I recall, he was a bit disappointed with the result, but managed a nice peice for the literary people about trainers. Nice enough to propel us to said place a few weeks so later.

The TLS is clearly into a bit of rough. The week after the shoe peice there was an even longer peice about poker. Although to be fair, that might have been some equivalent person from the LRB. Not going to check now.

Anyway, we piled out of Oxford Circus tube station and headed into the heart of Niketown, manfully ignoring the fact that we we a little on the old side for this particular establishment. And there were indeed fancy display cases containing massed ranks of trainers (only one from each pair. Maybe not everybody there was there for the greater glory of Nike). We might almost have been in the Greek pot rooms of the British Musuem. There were fancy, on-floor Apple computers where you could chat (to the personal computer) about your needs. There were inner sanctums where you could specify your own personal trainers, possibly modelled on those worn by Ashley Cole on his last outing for Leyton Orient and certainly made in China some weeks, if not months, after your plastic had passed through the finance machine. It all looked like a very expensive operation, staffed by hordes of eager and helpful acolytes, of both sexes, most of whose grandparents may not have been born in the UK.

But something was missing. It had been so well puffed by the TLS that the real thing seemed a bit flat. We did not even make it to the second floor where, inter alia, they did performance trainers for those of a basketball disposition.

So, by way of a consolation prize, we hoofed it up through Cavenish Square to the Wigmore Hall. Past the Langham Hotel, the vodka bar in the basement of which once took £30,000 from a bunch of German businessmen on a bender one evening. No complaints; everybody was happy with the transaction. I have yet to penetrate into this particular sanctum.

But the bar in the basement of the Wigmore Hall was a much more refined place; I am not sure if they sold vodka at all. But you did get a very large slice of brown cake with cream topping for £2.85. Plus a rather dressy crowd. As luck would have it, it was the day of the prize recital by this year's star pupil at the Guildhall School of Music, one Sasha Grynyuk. The star attractions, for me anyway, were Chopin's preludes (again. With a third rendering to come in Dorking in April). For warming up we had Haydn, Ligeti and Prokofiev. With a sonata by Scarlatti by way of an encore. I had never heard of Ligeti, but the peice was interesting. All micro structure - lots of interesting and moving texture - but no macro structure - apart from being split into lumps - that I could make out. Clearly a bit deficient in the ear. Certainly a real swine to play. Sasha G must have had very strong and strongly nerved forearms. But the main course, the Chopin, came fully up to expectations. Much that was new to me extracted from the Steinway supplied for the occasion. Not least the variety of said texture and tone. And the full house was very enthusiastic about the whole business.

Strolled home through Berwick Street to Leicester Square tube, with fine timing for the ten something to Dorking from Waterloo.