pumpkinstrokemarrow

This week's Irish stew, more properly St. Patrick's Eve stew, will be made from the last neck of lamb to be had yesterday from Manor Green Road. It seems that the other 19 had gone to a local prep. school to make their St. Patrick's Day stew. Very proper of them too. Sign of the times that one has to go to a prep. school to get such a thing; it seems most unlikely that the local primary schools will have time or funds. Although one of our local primary schools had the time and funds to erect a colourful mosaic advertising itself on an outer wall the other day. Must have cost a lot more than a lot of Irish stew.

Yesterday to town to try the carrot juice bar at Selfridges. Which turned out to be missing: the food hall had plenty of fast food franchises but we could not find one which did carrot juice. Thwarted here, moved onto Hyde Park to take a gander at the municipal art there.

The first item was a very large bronze of a decapitated horse's head - maybe 20 feet high - erected on its nose somewhere near Marble Arch. Both ugly and morbid. The head was balanced by a piece which appeared to consist of half a dozen giant jelly babies made out of some kind of translucent, brightly coloured plastic and erected on a tasteful plinth. We then proceeded west, across sundry roads, to get into the park proper.

Into the Italian Gardens where we noticed that the statue of Jenner, some kind of BH great uncle, had not had the bird lime cleaned off very recently. But we did see a couple of very large and handsome brown ducks - probably Egyptian geese - and a very tame heron which hopped about the edges of the ponds trying to avoid the people trying to take its picture. On down the western edge of the Serpentine - which was looking very well on this hazy spring afternoon - to find a couple of brown rats. Across the water from the brown rats was a large metal saucer, erected where I think there used to be a Moore sculpture. The ticket on our bank told us that it was by the same chap who designed the world's biggest April Fools' joke in the Olympic Park - which I am sure I have noticed before but cannot now find. The saucer was not rubbish, but it was not finished either: the man had not properly worked out how to connect the shiny saucer to the ground. A trick which lots of sculptures fail to pull off. A problem, the pictorial arts version of which vexed the Pre-Raphaelites enough that they used to make their own picture frames.

We next come across a sign which explains that the Royal Horse Artillery will be firing a 21-gun salute in the park on the 21st April next to mark the birthday of sprog 1. I shall have to tell him as I do not suppose the Artillery will have bothered with that bit. Might be OK on field guns but admin. not too clever.

Pushed on to the memorial to the late Princess of Wales to find that it is now graced by a large bronze duck. Not as bad as the horse's head but not very good. The memorial was guarded by a rather surly worker from a company called Enterprise, who, it seems, have taken over the maintenance of the Royal Park known as Hyde Park: the parky's have been privatised. No more Queen's Gardener, no more Queen's Parky. The park might still be splendid but it seems a pity that its maintenance has to be a matter of profit and loss. Memorial itself suffers from the same problem as the saucer: idea good but not finished. The important bit is not properly connected with the rest of the world.

The next memorial was to the cavalry of the empire, which looked to have been put up for the first world war and touched up for the second. The important bit of this memorial was a knight on horseback, in full armour, poking a large scaly thing underneath his horse with a lance: St. George and the dragon; a little anachronistic perhaps, but no more so that the whopping great near naked Achilles a bit further up the park. BH thought that we wound up with St. George the Dragon because the Plantagenet family did not think that St. Edward the Confessor, his predecessor, was really manly enough for a people engaged in a reverse conquest of France.

On down to Hyde Park Corner where we find that the Commonwealth memorial actually looks quite impressive if viewed from underneath the Wellington Arch. With, for the first time, flames coming out of the black bowls on top of the white pillars; clearly visible in the mid afternoon light when looking east. Pity about the silly little pavilion to one side. Pity about the smell of burning cooking oil hanging around the place.

I close with a planning puzzle. What on earth were the controllers of planning thinking of when they allowed some hotel in Buck. House Road, nearly opposite Buck. House Proper, to drape its elegant, fake Georgian frontage with some kind of green eco-carpet? Quite ugly; nothing at all like the far superior, rather arty and (I think) French effort in Piccadilly.