pumpkinstrokemarrow

On a lower plane, yesterday to London Town again for a spot more culture. Start out with a couple of Beethoven piano sonatas at the Wigmore, played by a couple of youngish French chaps. Very good they were too. House full and enthusiastic. One encore.

From there, moved onto the Toucan at Wimpole Street, formerly famed for its huge collection of Irish whisky to find that it is the Toucan no more and has been taken over by some Italians. Not very much Irish whisky but the warm guinness was OK and they did some cheap and decent lunch time snacks involving, inter alia, a fair amount of mozzarella.

After which, after having passed the place closed many times, found St Peter's Church open - also known as the Institute for Contemporary Christianity (http://www.licc.org.uk/). Get in to find that, office intrusions notwithstanding, the place is a handsome baroque church which turns out to have been built by the same chap who built St Mary le Strand (see December 8th). There was also some interesting stained glass, designed by Burne Jones and executed by Morris & Co.. Never seen anything like it before. The guide explained that Morris & Co. did not approve of putting reproduction stained glass into old churches and only did this one as a special favour to the then vicar. Or perhaps rector. And I think that they had a point: the stained glass was interesting but did not suit the building particularly well.

Next stop was the Sotheby's sale room in New Bond Street to take a quick peek at the stuff in their impressionist and modern art sale this evening. Or to be less economical with the truth, we did not go down New Bond Street with that in mind, rather I was looking for Davidoff's. Failing that we had to make do with Sotheby's. They did, as it turned out, have some very fine pictures on show and the place while busy was not crowded in the way of one of those art exhibitions put on by the Royal Academy or the National Gallery. Bought souvenir programme which came with a very fancy carrier bag to show off on the way home and a mini-programme inside the main-programme which one might pass onto the BH. As with the Canaletto (see January 15th), surprised at how feeble the illustrations looked compared to the real thing, still fresh in the mind's eye.

Interesting to see the sort of people who go to such things. Lots of suits talking into their mobiles: were they buyers for oligarchs? Some arty people there for the pictures. Some people who looked as if they might be rich. Some tourists. One chap who looked as if he might be a footballer. Sotheby's people cruising around looking for fat cheque books to stroke. We could have spun out the people watching aspect of the visit in the tea room which looked to have recently been installed in the entrance corridor but we were a bit tired by this point so we didn't. And we didn't have the £20m or so to hand needed to buy a middle ranking Picasso - a sum which would buy one side of the road in which we live - so didn't leave a bid at the desk.

PS: I find this morning that the Davidoff's web site is blocked. Presumably it counts as advertising tobacco in some forbidden way.