Boris’s Bikes

It’s Barclays Bank Bikes, unfortunately. Shame about that. However good London’s new bike hire scheme may be, having Barclays plastered over the bikes cheapens the whole thing. The bikes are numbered. In one row I passed, the bikes had numbers in the 17,000s, so there are a lot of them around. Perhaps not surprisingly the stands around University College had very few bikes in the stands. Those around Euston Road were full.

If you want to know how the scheme works, go here.

Night at the Museum (1)

Well, not quite. More like an afternoon, four hours walking around the British Museum. Never been before. Well, that’s not true either. Never been properly. I used to walk past it when I was at Uni in London (but never inside it. I was more interested in the museums in Exhibition Road). Years later I often visited the Museum’s map room to look for the exact locations of old mines in Cornwall, and I recall walking past huge Egyptian stone carvings without taking much notice. Last week I spent time there. The thing that struck me most about the place is that it is full of loot, things that don’t really belong to us, treasures of all kinds removed mainly from countries around the Mediterranean – the most well-known being the ‘Elgin Marbles’. That said, it can be argued – fairly convincingly – that if we hadn’t taken many of these items, then they would no longer exist. In the case of the Parthenon, the source of the ‘Marbles’, the Turks had already accidentally blown the place up when they used it as an ammunition dump.

Mozart by electric candles

The Mozart concert at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall last Saturday was advertised as Mozart by Candlelight. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected the candelabras to have real candles, not these days, not on stage in a crowded concert hall. The Mozart Festival Orchestra performed in Regency costume, an excellent bit of theatre that for me made up for the disappointment of the electric bulbs. I suppose I should have looked at the small print (A sublime evening of Mozart masterpieces performed in an evocative candle-lit style setting). At least I now know what ‘candle-lit style’ means, i.e., not real.
One member of the orchestra appeared to have injured his leg and came in supported by an NHS crutch. I suppose it would have been asking too much of the management to provide him with a crutch more in keeping with the Regency style.

Oh – the performance? Faultless, I would say. I’ll admit that I’m not a huge Mozart fan and that we took our Granddaughter more for the atmosphere than the music – hence my slight annoyance with the ‘candle-lit style’. The NHS crutch was less of a problem. It seems nobody else noticed.

That pond…

The pond dipping platform at Middle Pond at Whitmuir Organics now has a hand rope with a steel core. It is ex-naval, the kind of thing that goes around the edge of yachts and it should stop me falling in again. The blue drums need to be wrapped to make them a bit more presentable. It means I’ll have to go in the pond again – though this time I’ll be wearing waders.