Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Travel
Off to London Town yesterday. Four seater compartments all occupied so we took a two seater. Whereupon three cheerful ladies on a day out, a little older than ourselves, got on looking for a four seater so that they could natter. So they sat down rather loudly in the one to our left, joining a small and inoffensive man who promptly took off for one of the free two seaters. For the next forty minutes the carriage was treated to a conversational medley. We learned about one ladies' cat minding arrangements now that she no longer lived in Wimbledon near her sister. Another ladies' lady acquaintance had been invited to leave her own sitting room to smoke in her garden by a gentleman visitor. What a cheek! Someone else was able to recount the highlights from a recent operation through a key hole on her gall bladder. There was a spirited discussion about the merits of holiday destinations. Egypt, Sharm el-Sheikh and Madeira. Where the diving facilities adequate for husbands? Someone's son had a flat in Earlsfield which he had on the market for the apparently huge sum of £400,000. There was a discussion about the contrariness of called something a flat which had stairs and was not on the flat at all.
On arrival at Waterloo we were impressed to discover that one lady was holding a guide to the Wallace Collection and we left them pondering on how to get to Manchester Square. It all goes to show that it is hard to guess cultural preferences from appearances.
We ourselves went off to the British Museum for a canter around their version of Sutton Hoo (see 22nd September for the other version), taking in some Assyrian bas-relief wall decorating scuplture on the way. Sculpture fascinating, not only for the size and quality. One of them was the story of the construction of a giant statue of a bull, presumably destined for worship in some temple; my point of interest being that these people had moved on from just worshipping images of bulls and telling stories about important bulls. They told stories about building images of bulls. Stories which included pastoral vignettes of deer and families of pigs, exactly in the way that Italian devotional art came to add landscape to Madonna: Madonna being framed in a landscape rather than simply enthroned.
The Sutton Hoo exhibit was good - but rather put in its place by exhibits of other hoards and treasures found in other parts of the country. I thought the standard of exhibition was generally very high. The curators were content to leave the focus on the objects and not turn the thing into a three dimensional Dorling Kindersley (http://www.dorlingkindersley-uk.co.uk/) or Usborne (http://www.makelearningfun.co.uk/. Do not confuse with Osborne. They do accountancy) guide to the ancient world. Also impressed by the fact that they had not seen fit to fill the front yard with people selling things or conceptual art. One just had a space to be in. Have a smoke or a picnic or whatever. Unlike the people who run railway stations who seem to have forgotten that the point of a concourse area is to provide space for lots of people to move in lots of different directions in comfort. Not to provide shopping opportunities.
Back at Epsom Station, intrigued by the ground work for the redevelopment of the station - no modern station being complete without a six story development sitting on top of it. For some time I have been puzzling about the cylinders of concrete appearing in the spoil heaps. And today, on the way out, we passed a small digger carefully digging out the ground about a cluster of four piles - the piles having been drilled and filled a few weeks earlier. By the time we got back the cluster had turned into a pile cap - shuttering and steel ready and waiting for the concrete - with the concrete making up the top three feet of the four piles having been cut away, leaving their steel to be embedded in the pile cap. The intrigue here being why did they fill the piles right up in the first place? Or better still, why not dig the hole for the pile cap before drilling the holes for the piles? Was is just an expensive mistake? Clearly a matter on which to consult the resident engineers at TB.
# posted by Jim @ 3:20 AM 
