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During consumption, BH was using something called 'Olive' from Sainsbury's on her bread. A margarine which announced loudly on the lid that it was made with Mediterranean olive oil. Sub-text: life giving, life enhancing and all the rest of it. Probably good for your sex-life. And much more quietly on the side of the container that the biggest two ingredients were water and rapeseed oil, with olive oil coming in third at 20%. Which all goes to show that as well as selling food from their basic range, they also do food labelling.

Then moved onto a chunk of Yau (2nd November). Where I glean two fascinating (to me anyway) factlets. First, that the surface described by the complex equation 'z1^5 + z2^5 + z3^5 +z4^4 + z5^5 = z1*z2*z3*z4*z5' is something of a complexity which few would suspect from the simplicity of the equation. Isn't it just a twisted sphere or something? But actually of a complexity which helps nerds unravel the inner secrets of the universe. Second, a chap called Schubert (not the musician) counted the number of straight lines that you could draw on this surface, arriving at 2,875. Odd both that there should be this sort of number of lines and that it is possible to enumerate them.

Yesterday was intended to be the day of the knife, I having decided that I needed a new sort of knife with which to unpack oranges. However, as it turned out, it became the day of four churches. Started off with a very decent and reasonable lunch in a place called 'L'Ulivo' in Villiers Street. They don't seem to have a web site but they do have a registered office in Shepherd's Bush should you happen to be that way.

First stop after that was St Mary le Strand, a splendid, if slightly faded, baroque church from the early 18th century. Would not have been out of place in Paris, serving the Catholics. But the upper Lord was put in his place by a very large lion and unicorn job celebrating the lower Lord, aka George I, affixed to the highest point of the arch to the apse. Helped along by a very helpful and knowledgeable attendant. Shame that we have so little use for buildings of this sort.

Next stop was St Clement Danes, which it not the oranges and lemons one, rather the RAF church. Site dating back to the Danish London ghetto of the 9th century but the present building of similar date to St Mary le Strand. With the differences of being bigger, lighter and in much better repair. Very good job of rebuilding after the war, the roof having been knocked in by a bomb. Very RAF flavoured. I could imagine veterans taking the place very seriously in the fifties and sixties when people of that age still believed in corporate worship. Organ donated by the USAF. The windows were made up of small pieces - say nine inches square - of glass which had been textured in such a way as to be only just about transparent. So the windows let the light in but you were not distracted by being able to see the trees (or whatever) outside. Images much too distorted. A clever wheeze, achieving some of what stained glass achieves.

Next stop was King's College Chapel, to which we had been directed by the attendant at St Mary le Strand. Extraordinary place, put up in the middle of the 19th century. Very colourful and presently restored to more or less its original condition. Except the roof, which had had to be truncated to accommodate an anatomy theatre above. Not like its relative in Cambridge at all. We also came across a couple of cases celebrating the college's pre-eminence in the field of dentistry. Inter alia, all kinds of unpleasant looking instruments and dodgy looking dentures.

Last stop was a quick visit to St John's at Waterloo, drawn in by an advertisement for a sculpture by a lady of Brazilian origin called Ana Maria Pacheco. Who along the way has collected an honorary degree from the APU where my brother used to teach. The sculpture turned out to be interesting, appearing to be the product of a rather tormented soul and reminding us very much of the Spanish sculpture in wood which we saw last year (25th November 2009). And while the church itself is a very handsome space, I did not think that the sculpture had been well placed in the space. Tucked in at the side rather than occupying a more dominant position.