pumpkinstrokemarrow

Yesterday was our day to pay homage to that monument to enterprise, J. D. Wetherspoon, a man who has built a huge pubco from nothing in not much more than twenty five years. We chose the branch near the railway station at Kingston upon Thames for the purpose, a typical rather than grand example of the genre.

Tuesday is the day of the steak deal, two steaks with all the bits and a bottle of wine for £15.99. It was reasonably clear that salmon counted as a steak but it took a little while to establish that rib-eye steak was not, even with a £2 supplement. We were also interested to see that if we had opted for baked potato rather than chips that the resultant meal would be gluten free: thoughtful of them to mention it, but a bit of a puzzle as to why chips should not be gluten free. Were they concerned about contamination from battered goods in the fryer?

Wine a touch bland but perfectly drinkable, meals perfectly eatable and the whole perfectly good value. Rounded up to perhaps £20 by a supplementary London Pride and white coffee, during the service of which the waitress had the grace to laugh when I asked her how on earth I was supposed to know whether the coffee was to be taken with hot or cold milk.

Back home to finish the first pass of 'The Geometry of Love' by Margaret Visser (see 16th, 20th and 27th December), an interesting and successful book built around an old church called Sant'Agnese fuori le mura, in Rome, the name being the same sort of thing as that of London's St. Sepulchre without. I had not really realised before how much closer to the Lord these old churches in Rome are, some of them dating back to the first centuries of Christianity and this one boasting seemingly genuine relics of Saint Agnes, done to death for the faith at the tender age of 13 or so in 305AD. I can now better see why the much newer churches in western Europe might want to acquire status & sanctity by getting hold of relics from that same era.

Visser is clearly fascinated by words and shares the derivations of lots of churchy words. So we learn, for example, that the word for bell in both French and German is derived from the Irish Gaelic 'clok' (or perhaps 'cloc') and the then Irish fondness for bells in churches, a fondness which then spread east. And that well cast bells ring on three octave notes, plus a perfect fifth plus a minor third, this accounting for their apparently distinctive timbre. And from bells to clocks. All good stuff - but one hopes she has done her homework and proof reading so that one can safely recycle the stuff in the pub.

She is also fascinated by the business of lady martyrs both being virgins and being raped, and the book ends rather luridly.

For a writer who appears to put a fair amount of herself on the line in her books, her web site - http://www.margaretvisser.com/ - is very coy about the rest of her life and one learns very little about it at all. The site also looks as if it might be rather out of date. Maybe her agent only gives it a wash and brush up when a new book - she is not a prolific writer - is rolling off the stocks.

We now come to the second modern marvel. The book has just one illustration, but a few clicks at Google and I have a wealth of information. Plans, diagrams and pictures - including one of Visser which has been attached to the church. I wonder how much traffic she has generated at the church? I would certainly like to take a look if I was ever in the vicinity. Google Maps excelled itself with close up aerial photographs of the area which gave one a really good feel for what the church might look like from the outside and for the area in which it sits.

The third modern marvel was the freak show on television last night. Both odd and unpleasant in that at a time when a teacher might get the sack for offering a pupil a lift home on a wet afternoon, a grotesquely fat lady is displayed, more or less naked, on our televisions. Did she do it for pay or for the glory?