pumpkinstrokemarrow

Following my remarks about Troilus & Cressida, been thinking more about honour and playing to win. According to Fred Vargas, when you play Mah Jong (something I have never done), a game involving collecting cards like dominos, a hand might be a winning hand but not very honourable. One can play the hand and win the pot, but your win would lack class. And one's hand can include honour dominos, which do not affect the hand's score but which do give it lustre. In both ways, there is an incentive to show restraint and not rush in with the first winning hand you lay your hands on. Better to wait and do the thing with style. One might do the same sort of thing in chess. If one's opponent makes a blunder, you do not make him take the move back, which might embarass the blunderer, but on the other hand you do not take much advantage of it. Rather you make a move which no more than signals the fact of the blunder. The game can then proceed, more or less as if the blunder had not happened. But a bit of courtoise has been brought into the game. Lifted it a bit above street fighting. In the days when fighting was a sport for toffs, rather than a fully serious business I suppose there was room for courtoise. Perhaps since Louis XIV made it a national obsession, that room has been lost. We all have to fight to win, very few holds barred.

Discovered a fine new eatery between performance and lecture - http://www.tapasbrindisa.com/. Bit noisy, but open on Sunday afternoon, good ambience and grub. There might even have been a party of Spaniards eating there. Must go again when we have a bit more time to do justice to the place. Tried their savoury broad beans, expecting something green, but actually got some very hard, spicey pale yellow things, about the size of a 5p peice. Interesting, but one might trash the fillings if one had too many of them. Did not try their cheese ice cream - Manchego - which seemed a rather odd concept. But, as the waiter pointed out, cheese cake is a bit odd when compared with proper cakes like victoria sponges - an we eat plenty of that.

But by the time we reached the bar at the Globe, the BH decided that ice cream was the thing after all. The bar staff were not at all sure whether it was on the menu, but given that there were a lot of them and they were not doing much, they agreed to scuffle around and drum something up. So the BH had a very nice vanilla ice cream - including what looked like flecks of genuine vanilla pod - while I did my pint and half of Budvar. Far too cold, but otherwise not a bad lager.

I should add that on the way back to the Globe, we had come across a productive pile of rubbish. Someone had thrown away three large tupperware like tubs - they appeared to be brand new although one did have a chip out of the rim - the sort of thing one might pay a couple a quid a pop for. So they got tucked into the by-then empty picnic bag. Someone had also thrown away various binders from CIMA Part I. Persumably whoever it was had either just passed or chucked in the towel. We passed. I thought the chances of my reading such stuff, even as something to fill the empty space between Waterloo and Epsom, was very small.